Hi,
After I upgraded to the new iOS 5, the message counter no longer appears. I've gone into the settings to verify that it is turned on. I've turned it off and then back on. I've rebooted the phone, but to no avail. Has anyone else encountered this new "feature"?
Thanks,
Allan
Yes, I have tried this several times. However, no matter how many characters I type the character counter doesn't work at all whether it be 10 characters or 100 characters. There seems to have been some basic regression testing missing here. Being a person that been a part of the IT "world" for over 25 years, I believe I could assist your business with its everyday challenges.
Thanks,
Allan Hunter
I experienced the same problem. I found that if you turn off iMessage under the Messages button in Settings, the character count will show up again. It has something to do with that button. The iMessages texts are blue in color for your messages and green when it is turned off.
I believe they got rid of the message character count because it doesn't really matter if you're sending a text through iMessage (it's through Wifi/3G). Whereas with SMS through your provider, there will be a character limit per SMS (160 or something like that). So there's no need to show the character count if you're using iMessage.
The only way I can get character count back is to disable both iMessage and MMS. I agree it is annoying. iMessage only works between iOS 5 devices, and since the whole world does not use Apple products, it's not like I still won't be sending plain old SMS text messages to people. If you type more then the SMS character limit, AT&T still happily sends it, their servers just truncate it, so the character count feature is hardly an outdated or pointless feature.
I have been sending fewer and fewer texts though anyway, and using email instead. but this just pushes me further away from texting. Most of my work texts are to blackberry users, so no iMessaging with them, but having to go back and forth into settings to enable/disable iMessage means I will likely just leave iMessage off all the time anyway.
I may have spoken too soon. As a test, I disabled all messaging settings, then did a soft reset of my iPhone 4. Once it rebooted, I went back in and enabled all the messaging settings, including Character count.
Now, if I open messaging and start a new message, and pick a phone number as send to (someone who I know does not have an Apple iOS 5 device), I do have character count back.
I just thought it should work, since iMessage already knows, as soon as a recipient is picked, whether it can send as iMessage or must use SMS or MMS, in which case why should those options not work as before. Since the reset fixed it, I can only assume some setting did not get set correctly when I first set up iOS 5 after the update.
Have you tried typing long enough? It will only appear once you start the second line of text.
The character count when sending a message doesn't work with the new iOS 5.
