Sending unicode SMS
Following a few comments regarding being unable to send SMSs in Amharic with the Ge’ez keyboard installed I thought I’d have a better look into this. Also we’re looking to involve the volunteer community health workers (VCHWs) in our maternal care project and they are likley to need any text messages to be Tigrinyan or Amharic rather than English.
It seems that this isn’t only an issue with Amharic, others have had issues sending ‘ñ’ or accented characters using Android, so I can pretty much rule out that this is an issue with the Ge’ez keyboard.
Much like debugging language/font issues with database driven websites, with Unicode SMSs there are a number of places where a problem can prevent the message being encoded correctly – both of the phone handsets need to have the right font installed and be capable of sending unicode SMS, plus both the network operators need to have their networks configured correctly to send unicode text messages. There’s little we can probably do if network operators aren’t set up to send/receive unicode SMSs and from what I’ve read (e.g. here, here and here) most issues seem to be with US mobile operators.
Using my Spanish sim card (on an HTC Hero with the Ge’ez keyboard installed) I was able to send and receive messages in Amharic with my UK sim card:
My colleague Araya has also been testing sending unicode SMSs in Ethiopia, between an HTC hero phone and one of the (Ethiopian assembled) Tana mobiles – and this has been working fine.
So the main issue that we’ve had so far is with sending between some phones in the US – for some reason one phone will receive unicode SMS fine, but is unable to send – I’m guessing this has something to do with the the network operator settings rather than the phones themselves.
For reference:
GSM alphabet – which should work on all operators
Yes the problem is definitely with the phones. I am no expert but I think the network operator wont care about what you wrote or what font you used to write it. It just converts the messages to 0s and 1s and send it. Yes, as you said, the receiving phone must be able to display the text with the proper font. If there is no font (no support for the text font type), it displays weird characters or the regular boxes.
I live in Ethiopia and I was able to fully send and receive Amharic SMS between my Galaxy S to and a Nokia X2. The X2 read the sent message properly. And with the help of a flash app for the Nokia, I sent an Amharic SMS back to the Galaxy S and it worked well. So the said problems must with the phones, not with your cool Ge’ez keyboard for android. For example, the Nokia 6300 or Nokia N72 can’t read Amharic SMS, plus the Amharic flash app won’t work on it.
BTW, I don’t know if you know this but Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has Amharic language support. Almost all items and menus can be viewed in Amharic. Its a really neat thing. My phone looks charming with the Amharic font on it.
Thanks for your message Tame. Really interesting and very good to know that Android 4 has Amharic supported by default
The network operator does have some influence on whether you can send/receive unicode as they need to allow utf-8 encoded messages to be sent – I ran some tests with someone in US who had amharic keyboard installed and although I have it installed too, we couldn’t send texts to each other in ge’ez – this was due to his network operator in the US. Fortunately (and as they should!) ETC do have unicode enabled.
One point to note on sending unicode (ge’ez) SMSs is that it can cost you more depending on the length of the message. If you send an SMS with just latin script then you get up to 160 characters for one SMS, but this is reduced to 70 for ‘other’ alphabets. So a 150 character message in latin script would be 1 SMS, but you may get charged for 3 SMSs if you sent 150 characters in Ge’ez. Though I’m not sure how ETC charges for unicode SMSs. There’s a bit more info here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/e-mail-messaging/sms.htm – although it relates to Chinese characters, it’s likely to be the same for Ge’ez.
Cheers,
Alex
you are right. when I am typing Ge’ez I am limited to 70 characters. I sent 35 characters and it charged me the usual tariff (0.35ETB). but when i tried to send 73 characters it charged me 0.70ETB (two SMS). thanks for the tip!
No worries, and thanks for testing this – I’m not in Ethiopia now, so haven’t been able to test. It’s something that isn’t immediately obvious to most phone users, but can make quite a difference if you’ve got a tight budget for the money you can spend on mobile top-up cards.
Hi Alex, me again!
just wanted to ask if there is any way to quickly revert back to Android keyboard from Amharic keybord. Forexample, on default android keyboard I can press [touch] and hold the space bar and a pop up menu will appear letting me choose between keyboards/input method. But this doesn’t work on the amharic keyboard. So is there another quick method rather than going through settings and stuff?
thanks,
Hi Tame, yes you can change keyboards more easily by pressing and holding the field you’re typing text into. A pop up should appear and one of the options is ‘input method’ select this and you can change to which ever keyboard you have installed,
Cheers, Alex
looks like Google have removed that feature from ICS because nothing comes up on long press (though it works for older android versions). Thanks anyways for the reply.