it’s very very big in europe, not so in the states or in canada. why is that so?
I’m not into s&ms-ing anything or anything with sms in it, far to kinky fir us Canadians.
MarkB
well, here in the old country nobody’ll say no to a good s&ms
I read somewhere recently that Pc’s,ISP’s et alia are a hell of a lot cheaper across the pond than here in Europe,hence E-mailing is much more popular there than here.
Text-messaging is ok for very short messages about delays,traffic jams etc but how anyone ever saw it as a viable means of serious communication is beyond me.
Slan,
D.
Texting and emailing have combined over here a bit - my Tmobile phone can send and receive email messages as texts. Limited to 160 characters, though, so it required training my friends a little bit…
Free for the emailer of course but it costs a nickel to send and a nickel to receive after your free 50 incoming messages per month are used up.
In Ireland it cost some amount to send texts but free to receive. For that reason I am guessing they don’t have the option to send a message from email to phone…
It’s because the USA elected to ignore the GSM communications standards that Europe adopted for cellphones, and went their own way instead.
In the GSM world, text messages (SMSs) are a ‘free’ side-effect of the digital signalling system employed by the network (although it ain’t free to the customer… most European network providers make virtually all their profits from text messages).
In the USA, for reasons best known to the operators themselves, they went AMPS/PCS and later CDMA (2G) which doesn’t have text messaging facilities.
Instead, the various comms companies made a bundle flogging Pagers. So you had to buy a cellphone (for voice calls) and a Pager (to get ‘text messages’).
However, in the world of 3G this will not be so… for verily if Cingular adopts UMTS as their 3G standard in opposition to Verizon’s CDMA 1xEVDO roll-out, then text messaging, push-to-talk, mobile “presence awareness” (kinda like MSN IM on the cellphone) will be global. Ish.
There are very very few GSM networks in the USA, which is why most European cellphones won’t work “over there” and since there are no CDMA/AMPS/PCS networks in Europe (excluding CDMA 450 in the Eastern bloc countries), US cellphones don’t work “over here”.
Once 3G rolls out properly though, the truly roaming device (cellphone, laptop, pda etc) will be possible. But it won’t be cheap to roam abroad with your cellphone (just like it ain’t cheap now within Europe).
whoa, way too many abreviations for me, but I guess I got your point, thanks gary, and still, you know you want that album.
I actually think it’s polite to txt, bcs it dsnt rqurie an instnt nswer. Sumtimz my phon rings and if I dnt nswer, the prson hngs up.
Tht nvr happnz wit txt.
Also easier for sndng addresses and numbrz.
Sorry about the abbrevs., I work in the cellphone communication industry (although I do of course use the word ‘work’ advisedly).
Think of it like every other difference between the USA and Europe. We had imperial inches/gallons/miles, they had (still have) US inches/gallons/miles, but they’re completely different.
Same as US electricity is different to most of Europe (we have 220/250V supplies, US and others have 120V). So a US appliance will blow up if plugged in over here, and ours run like cack (if at all) over there…
GSM (Global Standard for Mobile communications) was supposed to allow everyone to wander 'round the world using their cellphones wherever they were. But the USA didn’t adopt that standard.
Just like a US TV won’t work in Europe (US standard is called NTSC, most of Europe is PAL, except France who invented their own system called SECAM), and a European telly won’t work in the USA.
So they don’t get SMS text messages, except in the very small regions covered by GSM operators (like T-Mobile mentioned above).
SMS/texting is a huge money-making machine, thanks entirely to teenagers. In a recent report, one teenager apparently clocked up £200 worth of SMS messages in a month. Mainly because they can’t hear each other in nightclubs these days, so instead of trying to shout at each other they text each other instead.
At 10p for 160-character text message as opposed to 5p for a minute’s voice-call, the operators are loving it!
A fun bit of trivia from this amateur radio operator. Text messaging is formerly named Short Message Service, or SMS for short.
When you receive an text message, most phones will give a Morse-Code sounding tone to indicate the arrival of a new message. The tone pattern, di-di-dit da-dah di-di-dit, is Morse Code for…
SMS
73’s de KE6PN k
When receiving an SMS, my Nokia plays a song: “Kein Schwein ruft mich an …” - sounds cooler than …–…
keine sau interessiert sich fürrr miiiiichhh…
I always wanted to use text messaging, but I can’t read and that makes it difficult to tell who it’s from.
I was once sitting at a bar with a friend of mine who happens to be English when his mobile phone rang. After a very brief conversation with the person on the other end he turned to me and said;“It was Danny,wonder how he knew we were here?”
Mind you ,we had been sitting at the bar for a few hours at this point.
I kid you not,
Slan,
D.