Jul 22 2012
Irish Characters in SMS Messages
There was an article in the media during the week describing how people are charged more for sending SMS messages in Ireland containing accents. See Texters charged for the síneadh fada.
Personally, I do not see the problem here! If you are sending characters that are outside of the normal character set then you should expect to fit less characters per SMS message (or else pay more for more SMS messages)!
I had the opportunity to discuss this with some Spanish, Polish, and Italian friends yesterday. Some of them said that they get charged more for using accents on their home networks, and others did not know. More interestingly, none of them use accents when sending SMS messages either because it is too slow or akward to find the character, or because it is never needed to understand the message. It was also pointed out to me that this is the same in English, for example, where people use “u” instead of “you”.
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