SMS Shift Table

http://www.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/70000.html

We have implemented shift table support (locking shift table and single shift table) to NowSMS for the following languages: Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

Shift tables are a way to support national language characters in SMS messages without requiring Unicode characters. (If a message contains any characters that require Unicode encoding, the entire message becomes subject to a 70 character limitation per message instead of the normal 160 character limit. Shift tables are a way to overcome this limitation.)

Shift table support is necessary in the handset in order for the client to be able to see these characters when shift table encoding is used.

For the Turkish language, shift tables add support for the following national language characters: Ğ, ğ, Ş, ş, İ, ı, ç

For the Spanish language, shift tables add support for the following national language characters: ç, Á, Í, Ó, Ú, á, í, ó, ú.

For the Portuguese languages, shift tables add support for the following national language characters: Á À Â Ã ª á à â ã É Ê é ê Í í Ó Ô Õ º ó ô õ Ú Ü ú ü ` ç ∞

The 10 Indian languages that are supported contain too many characters to mention here ... and are so newly defined (3GPP Release 9) that they are unlikely to have any handset support for shift tables yet. However, we wanted our implementation to be flexible enough to support all currently defined shift tables.

Support for these shift table capabilities are still preliminary at this time. Additional information on how to enable NowSMS to support these shift tables is only being provided on request at this time. Please feel free to reply to this thread if you need more information.

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http://www.nowsms.com/shift-tables-national-language-sms-in-160-characters-without-unicode

The fact that messages that contain characters outside of the GSM character set require Unicode encoding and are limited to 70 characters per message instead of the expected 160 character limit, is a frustrating limitation for many languages.

Messages longer than 70 characters can, of course, be sent, but they are sent as multipart (segmented) messages, and reassembled by the receiving client.  If a message that contains Unicode characters is longer than 70 characters, it is broken into segments of 67 characters for sending.  To send a 160 character message requires 3 SMS messages if the message contains characters that are not part of the GSM character set.

The original GSM protocol was developed in Western Europe, so it includes most Western European characters, plus capital letters in the Greek alphabet in order to facilitate Greek SMS support.  You can view a table of characters in the GSM character set at the following link:  http://www.nowsms.com/long-sms-text-messages-and-the-160-character-limit

A recent posting on the NowSMS Technical Forums discusses recent developments in the 3GPP specifications to add additional national language support to the SMS standard, and eventually overcome these limitations.  For additional discussion of this topic, we recommend joining the discussion at http://www.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/69650.html.   The start of this discussion is highlighted below.

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Android 2.3.5 supports “SMS Shift tables”, which allows devices to support national language characters in SMS messages without requiring Unicode characters. If a message contains any characters that require Unicode encoding, the entire message becomes subject to a 70 character limitation per message instead of the normal 160 character limit. SMS Shift tables allows devices to overcome this limitation.

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Android phone property : telephony.sms.shift_table : true/false