[apple007]

Thanks for the replies.

Originally Posted by torifile It's not a cell phone specific thing. The SMS implementation is only for 160 characters per message. The iPhone knows this and will likely spilt the outgoing message up before it's sent.

That's what I had thought, but then iPhone came along and has no (visibly-discernible) outgoing/incoming character limit *and* doesn't bother to display the character count for messages being typed, so I started to think it was cell phone-specific.

Originally Posted by scratt I kind of thought the last time I did a long text message the iPhone stopped taking input at a certain point, which I presumed was when I hit that magic character count. But I have not actually experimented so could be wrong. ...

I've typed some outgoing messages that were well into the 200s and possibly even 300-plus characters without any sort of feedback from the iPhone that a limit has been reached.

As much as I like the seamless implementation (i.e., can type as much as I want in one outgoing message and incoming messages are (apparently) merged into a single "balloon"), I wish there was a character-counter for outgoing messages. If SMS is indeed limited to 160 characters per message, I'd hate to be sending out any 162-character messages, which (a) means I'm getting billed for two messages and (b) likely annoying the hell out of recipients who get a "part 2" text message with perhaps two characters in it, and get billed a full message for the privilege.

... This is something I find particularly annoying about text messages, which are overpriced, and badly implemented by all but the best mobile networks.. And on those 'best' mobile networks you are paying through the nose because they are in countries like the UK, Spain etc.

I avoided sending txt msgs like the plague pre-iPhone, but iPhone's implementation is so good I've started sending more. That said, I still dislike the platform, and agree 100% that the service is over-priced and underwhelming in almost every implementation.