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Iphone 156 character texts...

acearchie

acearchie

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 15, 2006
3,264
104
Im not sure about other countries but here in the UK 1 sms counts as 156 characters.

Is there anything free that will count how many characters my message is as I only have 600 texts a month and if I write 157 characters it will count as two messages!

Thanks
 
philgilder said:
it's 160 characters, and no, there are no apps that can do this, unless you jailbreak
Click to expand...

Is it? On my old phone it would display 156 characters before saying I had started the second text!

Fortunately I am jailbroken. Is there an app?

Thanks
 
Wow...seriously, I can't believe the iPhone doesn't have a character counter. I know Apple has a weird MO but honestly.

More and more it makes me feel like this is one of those things to entice carriers for agreements.."We'll leave out a character counter in the text app so that people won't know how many they're sending"
 
You'll have to jailbreak or get really good at guessing. Count out a few 160 character messages and get a feel as to how long they are (how many lines?). Then maybe you will be able to just stay under the amount without counting.
 
FSMBP said:
Wow...seriously, I can't believe the iPhone doesn't have a character counter. I know Apple has a weird MO but honestly.

More and more it makes me feel like this is one of those things to entice carriers for agreements.."We'll leave out a character counter in the text app so that people won't know how many they're sending"
Click to expand...

This is because the iPhone doesn't separate the text bubbles. It allows you to type as much as you want and then sends them as linked messages. Some smartphones, like the iPhone, display these linked messages as 1 message to the user.

If you have limited texts, then I would suggest that you send txts from an IM program whenever possible. You can use AIM (and other clients) to send messages to your friend's cell phones. This way AIM counts as data instead of txt messages.
 
I'm pretty sure that if you're just sending one text, the limit is 160, but if you're sending a longer message that will be split up, the limit is 156 characters as the phone needs to use a few bytes to tell the receiving phone that it's a multi-part message so it can put it back together.
 
I'd like to know what jailbreak app adds this warning too? or maybe they're referring to using one of the seperate SMS apps, which I don't want to do really.
 
AiralynRose said:
If you have limited texts, then I would suggest that you send txts from an IM program whenever possible. You can use AIM (and other clients) to send messages to your friend's cell phones. This way AIM counts as data instead of txt messages.
Click to expand...

Sadly dont have a data allowance! Im on an unlocked jailbroken iphone 3g!

Just wanted to make sure I wasnt sending too many texts!
 
BiteSMS has a character counter (it'll also count how many texts you've sent overall and you can reset it whenever your contract renews). You have to pay for it eventually, but you get something like 3 weeks of free usage.

I really like BiteSMS actually, it's a nice app in a few ways. Opened faster than the stock app for me too.
 
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