as it turns out, the lack of a counter for characters when composing Short Message Service (SMS) messages is only part of the weaknesses of SMS handling on the iphone. telematic software is something that is new for apple, and it really shows. a bit sad for a $600 device, but of course we can all hope to see some improvements in coming software updates...
any non-ASCII character seems to create a problem for the iphone. sometimes these characters are displayed as spaces, sometimes as two-character sequences of non-letter symbols, which looks as if somewhere inside the iphone the non-ASCII is transformed into UTF-8 , but then another piece of software is unable to handle this properly.
what is even more disturbing is that a certain number of non-ASCII characters totally derails the iphone. for example, sending test sms: äöüÄÖÜôœùûüÿàâçéèêëïîÔŒÙÛÜŸÀÂÇÉÈÊËÏÎ
(which is a valid sequence of SMS characters and successfully handled by most phones) leads to the iphone saying that it received an empty message, which is pretty far from what actually happened. so it seems as if the character handling in the iphone's SMS app required a pretty major overhaul.
Another rather basic thing about SMS handling is that the iphone is incapable of recognizing messages which are spanning multiple SMS messages. SMS message concatenation is a very basic SMS mechanism which is successfully handled by even the cheapest phones you get for free when buying a prepaid card, and it is not really that complicated. another thing we can hope for in the next software update.
apart from the annoyance of paying $600 for a phone which does not even implement very basic SMS mechanisms, i am more wondering about the test cases (or rather lack thereof) which apple must have used when engineering the software. the problems with ASCII characters and concatenated messages are not exotic corner-cases, they will occur very often for anybody using the SMS app.
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