For a while ive had a blackberry pearl 8100 with the T-mobile network. Recently I moved and T-mobile here has horrible coverage so Ive switched to Sprint. Of course I loved my 8100 so I bought Sprints 8130. Other than the lack of MMS support (which I may be solving tonight with an update), the only other issue I have is that I can no longer 'string' text messages together. On my 8100, if I went over the 150 character text limit it would simply start a new text right where I was, no saving of drafts or anything fancy, and the top of the screen listed as "150 1/6" (meaning I had 150 character left and was on my first message. Basicly meaning I could type a 900 character message before I needed to start a new text). But on my new Sprint phone I dont have that option, When I reach 150 characters it simply stops typing and if I need to continue the message I either must sent it and type the next message quickly so that the recieving person doesnt ask me why I dropped off mid-text. Or I have to save it as a draft and start typing a new message, then send the multiple messages one after another. To me, this is a major pain in the ****. Is this just the difference between CDMA and GSM? or is Sprint just enjoying messing with my head??
1.2. Concatenated SMS Messages / Long SMS Messages
One drawback of the SMS technology is that one SMS message can only carry a very limited amount of data. To overcome this drawback, an extension called concatenated SMS (also known as long SMS) was developed. A concatenated SMS text message can contain more than 160 English characters. Concatenated SMS works like this: The sender's mobile phone breaks down a long message into smaller parts and sends each of them as a single SMS message. When these SMS messages reach the destination, the recipient mobile phone will combine them back to one long message.
The drawback of concatenated SMS is that it is less widely supported than SMS on wireless devices
Perhaps Sprint, or the 8130, does not support this.
SMS means Short Messaging Service, so it can only be so long. There is a way around this, I use MMS to send long messages with adding any media. It really works!!!
Yeah I'm lucky and have 5 bar EDGE service with TMO but I have a friend on Sprint and when she sends me over 160 char she has to spilt them up unlike TMO service which actually only pieces them together on TMO to TMO texting.
On my Sprint 8130, all straight text MMS messages are received as Sprint Picture Mail (with a clickable link), even when no picture is attached
friends without a data plan can't access them...
It really works!!!
