[EddyD]

I am on O2 in the UK, and have recently noticed that all of my friends get over 100characters per SMS (160characters I think).
Is there any way I can increase the number of characters per SMS? It gets rather frustrating when you overrun on your allowance per month, because everyone else has twice the characters per SMS that you do...

[Jancy10]

160 is the limit of characters in a BB, there are 3rd party apps you can purchse to increase this...Characters are limited by your carrier that's why yours is not the full 160 maybe your carrier only allows a max of 70

[EddyD]

But my younger brother has a pearl, on O2 and essentially the same contract package, but he is allwoed 160characters. It just leads me to believe I may have ticked the wrong box somewhere...

[Jancy10]

Were you able to type the whole 160 before or it has always been a limit of 70?

[EddyD]

It has always been 70characters but I recentyl realised taht I might be entitled to more...

When I create a new SMS the top of the screen reads 70/6

[Jancy10]

That's really rare, I don't think there's a setting to set a limit of characters in a text (not that I kno off)

The only thing I can suggest is buying the 3rd party app that adds character limit

[EddyD]

ok thanks. DOn't suppose you know the app name do you?

[Branta]

Applications won't help you, they either split the long SMS into multiple outgoing messages, or they send as MMS.

Check your default character set. 70 sounds like you are using a multibyte character (needed for non-latin languages like Chinese).

[EddyD]

SOrry to be a moron... how do I do that?

[EddyD]

Ok I solved it!

For anyone else with similar problems:
Options>SMS>Data Coding

Under DataCoding, reset it to 7bit, from UCS2.

And Hey Presto!