Write longer text messages

[tony37bar]

is there anyway i can make adjustments in my xperia sp settings to write longer messages. at present if i write a long message it sends it as 2 messages.

[Rickard]

It's not possible to increase the amount of characters that you can write in one SMS. How many characters you can write depends on your language but it's usually 160 or 70.

[Ramm31]

It would be good if you say in which countries the messages are longer, because in my country (Mexico) I can only write til 60 characters, and its very sad cuz I have a rate plan with a limited number of messages.

[prometej-zg]

It's not the problem with your phone.

It's like previous post said, limitaton of SMS "technology". When using ASCII characters (or if you wish - 26 characters of English alphabet), you can write SMS 160 charachters long. But when you want to write SMS using your native language charachters (like Spanish or in my case Croatian), you cannot use all 160 charachters, becasuse the message software changes encoding of the message internally so it can "translate" your "special" charachters into different encoding format, and that takes more space, which shortens your maximum message lenght.

If you wan't to use all 160 chars, then avoid your language non-English characters.

[Rickard]

It has to with what characters you write. When you write a text in english the text is encoded using 7-bit encoding which means that you can fit 160 characters in one SMS. Not all characters are supported by the 7-bit encoding though. If you write one or more characters that are not supported by 7-bit encoding the phone will switch to UCS2-encoding instead. It supports more characters but every character needs more data which means that you can't write as many characters in one SMS.

Unfortunately i don't know which countries/languages that use characters not supported by 7-bit encoding. When writing text, try avoiding non english characters if you want to fit more text into one SMS.

EDIT: prometej-zg beat me to it 

[Jarda]

In settings in SMS app find something like "reduce costs" and activate it :smileysmileywink: I don't know exact english term, my Android system language is Czech...

This option "converts" all non english characters to english, pure ASCII...

[prometej-zg]

I didn't even notice this in settings. Thnx for suggestion.:-)

[Jarda]

Anyway :smileysmileywink:

It's weird that this isn't  described, like huge amount of other important options, in user manual

[Ramm31]

Agree with you, the user manuals become very unuseful nowadays =/, but I still cant understand why they put this "restrictions" of characters in some languages.