This is only an issue for non-English speaking countries... That's why this is not a big deal for the North-Americans that sometimes simply don't understand what are we talking about...
In any mobile Phone (iPhone included), when you write a SMS using special characters like "ç","á","é","í","ó","ú","ñ","ä", etc, the SMS are limited to only 70 characters instead of 160 characters because a extended encoding is necessary! So, you pay 3x the price of an SMS if you write 160 characters (it will send 3 SMS: 70
7020). Besides that, the risk of the SMS not being delivered is higher because it is actually sending 3 SMS at once and sometimes it gets broken in the way.
So, to solve this issue, there is a feature in any Nokia mobile phone almost for 10 YEARS (!!!) called: "SMS Extended Character Set": ON/OFF
If turned ON, it uses extended character set with 70 characters per SMS and the destination Phone gets all the special characters: "ç","á","é","í","ó","ú","ñ","ä"
If it is turned OFF: the phone allows to write special characters, with 160 characters per SMS, but automatically converts the special characters to their basic equivalents "c","a","e","i","o","u","n","a" when sending the SMS.
... It is amazing how Apple is 10 years behind other mobile manufacturers in this matter... Maybe because Nokia is originally from Finland (where they use special characters and experienced the issue) while Apple is from the USA, where they naturally (and sadly) don't recognize this as a issue.
Imagine if you send 1000 SMS in a week and you have to pay them (I pay them to other operators).. You have to be very careful not to introduce any special character otherwise you pay 3x the money!
This is very very annoying because iPhone has auto-complete and auto-correct and always suggests the correct word! One drastic example is the Portuguese word "abraço" (it is "hug" in Portuguese)! It is how we end almost all the SMS and when you write it like "abraco", iPhone corrects automatically to "abraço" every time!!! arrgghhh....
Well, a simple feature that would make life easier for all non-English speakers around the world!
Any ideas about this?
Thank you!
