On 2012/04/27 17:06, Cristian Secară wrote:
It turned out that they (ETSI& its groups) created a way to solve the
70 characters limitation, namely “National Language Single Shift” and
“National Language Locking Shift” mechanism. This is described in 3GPP
TS 23.038 standard and it was introduced since release 8. In short, it
is about a character substitution table, per character or per message,
per-language defined.
Personally I find this to be a stone-age-like approach,
Fully agreed.
which in my
opinion does not work at all if I enter the message from my PC keyboard
via the phone's PC application (because the language cannot always be
predicted, mainly if I am using dead keys). It is true that the actual
SMS stream limit is not much generous, but I wonder if the SCSU would
have been a better approach in terms of i18n. I also don't know if the
SCSU requires a language to be prior declared, or it simply guess by
itself the required window for each character.
The right approach in this case isn't to discuss clever compression
techniques (I've indulged in this in my other mails, too, sorry), but to
realize that the underlying mobile/wireless technology has advanced a lot.
SMSes are simply a relict of outdated technology, sold at a horrendous
price. For more information, see e.g.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536&cid=22219254 or
http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages. That's even for the
case of pure ASCII messages.
The solution is simply to stop using SMSes, and upgrade to a better
technology.
Regards, Martin.
