Notices

Just today I have noticed that if I send an SMS with Spanish accents, it takes 91 extra characters for every vowel with an accent.

If I send other special characters like 'ñ' or '¿' they only take one character size.

So it's very easy to send messages that take more than the default size with an extra cost in your bill.

Has anyone noticed this behaviour?

Yes. Most phones reserve 2 bytes per letter if you use unicode charactes. So when you use them, SMS has 80 instead of 160 letters. This issue is not N900 specific.

BTW, as far as I have seen, N900 is the only phone that imidiately and correctly calculates nuber of remaining characters. Most phones will say you are still typing within 1 SMS, and send 2 of them.

Previous phones I've owned (such as the N95) would give you the option to choose between full unicode support - and the extra footprint that comes with it - and just using "extended character set", which I guess was something like Latin-1 using 8 bit characters. For "regular" languages such as French, Spanish or German, the latter would be sufficient.

Does anyone know if the N900 has a similar setting anywhere? I had a quick look but couldn't find it...

My God, so that was the reason why sometimes I got so few chars left on my sms... always wondered if there was some bug but couldn't find out what triggered it.

Wow I never noticed it before but this must a be a bug, no other phone that I have used has this problem

A single character with a " ´ " will take 91 spaces out of 160!

a single sms containing for example: ó will leave 69 character left to type
but if you include more : áéíóú it will have 65 remaining characters.

I can understand if they use 2 characters per letter, but 91? only for the first one? something must be broken.

When using one byte, 160. When using extended chars, it's two per char BY FORMAT, not by letter. So you actually get 80 instead of 160, plus other stuff like letting other phones know what to expect, etc.

Think of it this way: All passengers (letters) need to get there. If one has a large behind, the whole group gets upgraded to first class, where seats are twice the size. From 160 seats to 80, minus the fat behind, 79 to begin with.

First character to be DBCS switches modes. No eating 90 chars.

thank you for the explanation, I understand it now.

Thank you very much, now it explains why I have so many SMS sent at the same time in my bill.

Reopening this thread to ask: Does anybody know how to change encoding for SMS to "reduced support" (it is not using unicode)? Other Nokias have an option for that.