SMS with AT&T?

[ptuesday]

I'm not sure where to put this... but I'm with AT&T, and I didn't know if these were carrier specific questions or not, so I tried here. I haven't gotten the Nexus One yet, but I just got rid of my iPhone and I'm looking into it (or the new Blackberry). I have a few questions...

With SMS, on the AT&T service, does it have a character limit? Does the service have anything to do with this? I know most phones do, but they have a page limit as well, so it eventually gets sent all in the same message just on more than one page. I send large text messages quite frequently to someone who does not have a data plan on her phone (therefore I cannot email them to her). If the SMS app makes me send a bunch of little messages, well, this will stop me from purchasing the N1.

Also, I don't have a smartphone plan, but I do have unlimited data and text. Since this is a smartphone, I will have to upgrade, correct?

If this is in the wrong place, I'm sorry. New. :)

Thank you.

[Fuse]

unlimited data and text is all you need.

Text size limits are imposed by the carrier, not the phone. This is why you can make a page-long text on my N1, but it may show up as 10 texts to someone on another phone.

[ptuesday]

Originally Posted by Fuse

Text size limits are imposed by the carrier, not the phone. This is why you can make a page-long text on my N1, but it may show up as 10 texts to someone on another phone.

Ahhh...so if I send a text to the person I mentioned above and it's, say, four pages, and we're both on the same carrier and she can recieve long messages as well, then it works?

[kevindaledavis]

Originally Posted by ptuesday

Ahhh...so if I send a text to the person I mentioned above and it's, say, four pages, and we're both on the same carrier and she can recieve long messages as well, then it works?

It's actually part of the SMS protocol. It was designed for SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE. Part of the protocol defines how to string together multiple messages. Up to the phone's software to decide on the presentation of it as one long message or multiple short ones. Doesn't matter if you are on the same carrier or not.

Go to the Wiki and search on SMS. Reading it shows why it is available on almost all cell platforms. It was designed to use an unused portion of the control infrastructure. So it was basically free to everyone except a couple of software engineers.

Also, in the US, if you or the recipient pays by the message or has a message limit, then a long message counts as multiple messages. So a 161 character message is actually 2 messages. Are engineering types wonderful?

[Fuse]

Thanks for elaborating - my main point was that despite how it is displayed, there is a limit that you may not be aware of because of how the software handles it.