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casjohnr

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 31, 2007
279
239
On my old K750i there was a rather useful feature in which it worked out how much I could put in a text message before I was onto my next text if you get what I mean by that.

On the iPhone I can't seem to find such a feature

Does it exist?
 

SayCheese

macrumors 68000
Jun 14, 2007
1,720
919
Oxfordshire, England
I think that you mean a counter for how many characters you have used per message. In the UK you get 160 characters per message.

I am pretty sure that this is a feature that is missing from the iPhone.
The cynical in me says that it is because O2 want you to send a message and not care if it goes over the 160 characters.

The practical in me says that it's just an Apple omission that can be easily corrected by a software update.
 

rayward

macrumors 68000
Mar 13, 2007
1,697
88
Houston, TX
When texting iPhone to iPhone, it re-connects split messages at the other end (if they are split at all - it's impossible to tell). There's a few areas like this (MMS, for example) where the iPhone lacks a function that other cell phones have because it doesn't need it...unless it's dealing with non-iPhones.
 

maestro55

macrumors 68030
Nov 13, 2005
2,708
0
Goat Farm in Meridian, TX
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A109a Safari/419.3)

If there is some way to make the iphone split text messages i would love to head about it. I have sent messages to a friend of mine and they are split up and put out of order if they go over the character limit.
 

abrooks

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2004
641
191
London, UK
iPhone has no method of telling you how much characters you have used but it certainly does split the messages, I notice when I send a long message the sending bar can often get stuck at the end as if it is sending another message.

Most modern phones join split messages together making it quite seamless.
 

TurboSC

macrumors 65816
Aug 4, 2007
1,361
0
California
iPhone has no method of telling you how much characters you have used but it certainly does split the messages, I notice when I send a long message the sending bar can often get stuck at the end as if it is sending another message.

Most modern phones join split messages together making it quite seamless.

lol I've had times where I would try to type as much as I could possibly fit into one message before sending it to "save money" those per pre-iPhone days in high school. lol
 

miniConvert

macrumors 68040
Proper character counting is an omission to be sure. Most folk would rather delete a character rather than send 161 characters over two text messages, but there you go. I'm sure it'll get sorted out eventually - unless it's part of Apple's war on all things that confuse or clutter the user experience.
 

MarkW19

macrumors 65816
Sep 13, 2002
1,209
1
Surrey, UK
It's more likely that Apple/AT&T/O2 etc. have agreed on this to make more money from text messages...and also it does make the whole experience more seamless I guess.
 

rayward

macrumors 68000
Mar 13, 2007
1,697
88
Houston, TX
It's more likely that Apple/AT&T/O2 etc. have agreed on this to make more money from text messages...and also it does make the whole experience more seamless I guess.

My wife went text-crazy with her iPhone, because it was so easy. She would send out these long texts in lieu of actual phone calls. Of course, we weren't keeping track of how many we sent, and didn't think that many of these texts were actually split into 2 or 3 messages.

The up shot was a large overage in our first bill for text messaging. I bumped the limit to 1500 messages, and so far have been ok.

FTR, I'm not complaining. One of the interesting things about the iPhone is realising just how much it changes your way of doing things. This was one of them, and now I've adjusted our plan accordingly.
 

autumnsong

macrumors member
Oct 26, 2007
93
0
Western North Carolina
I am frustrated by this too. It even splits the texts mid-word. And I often get the second half of the message first, and sometimes don't get the first half 'till much later (as much as 30 minutes to an hour at times) This makes for very confusing conversations! I also thought that we were allowed 160 characters, but have counted some that were sent as 2 messages, and the first message was only 150 characters or so. (I was including spaces). And now I'm also having the same problem I had when they were still Cingular, getting multiple copies of messages, and being charged for them. I once got the same message 10 times! I sure hope they fix this soon. :(
 
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