ask any person under 40 living in europe, and they will tell you that the limit for Short Message Service (SMS) messages on a mobile phone is 160 characters (actually, the limit is 140 bytes, which happens to be enough space for 160 7-bit characters, but that is not the point here...). ask apple about this limit, and they will probably not even know what you talk about. when writing SMS messages on the iphone, it does not tell you how many characters you have entered, or how many you may still enter before reaching the magic limit. network operators will be very happy, because this means people will more often send messages using more than only one of their ridiculously overpriced SMS messages. users will be less happy about that.
i always though my motorola phone was stupid, because it counted down from some random number rather than from 160. but at least the motorola engineers were dimly aware of the fact that there was some limit (they probably simply never bothered to look it up and some random proxy number remained in the phone's software), whereas apple is either not even aware of this limit, or decided hat users should not be so stingy when it comes to handing money over to the network operators. this opens up the door to all kinds of entertaining conspiracy theories, but i will leave that to others...
but: having such a counter would be very useful, and not having one really sucks.
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