iPhone 4 text message problems - 160 to 70 character-limit

Question

iPhone 4 text message problems - 160 to 70 character-limit

I've been struggling with sending texts writing in Spanish, cause often the character-limit would be reduced to 70 instead of 160.
I did some testing and figured out that from all the "special" letters you can get (including capitals) apart from the alphabet - only a few got accepted:

Ä ä à Ç É é è ì Ñ ñ Ö ö Ü ü
and the Norwegian letters: Æ æ Ø ø Å å

Consider then that I have found (and there are sure to be more) 88 so far, it makes for pretty bad statistics.

ALL THE OTHER LETTERS REDUCED THE TEXT LIMIT TO 70 (and you have to pay accordingly)

I've tried with both English and Norwegian SIMs, so it's not the carrier..

Any thoughts? Solutions?

iPhone 4, iOS 4

Posted on Mar 27, 2011 10:19 AM

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Answer 1

ajduguid

Level 3

650 points

Mar 27, 2011 10:37 AM in response to Pushitintelpacman

I don't think there is a solution, my previous (non-iPhone) did the same. You either bare the additional cost or avoid using certain characters. I'm assuming it's a limitation with sms rather than anything to do with the phone.

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Answer 2

Mar 27, 2011 5:38 PM in response to Pushitintelpacman

SMS can use different character sets which have different number of bits for each character. The basic character set uses 7 bits. At 160 characters that is 1120 bits. This number of bits is the size of an SMS. If you divide this by 70 (as in the max characters you are seeing) this gives an answer of 16, which is number of bits per character in the character set you are using.

I am not sure of a solution, other than not using those characters.

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