Introduction to mobile message types
The Short Message Service
(SMS) makes it possible to send and receive messages to and from
mobile telephones. Messages can contain text or binary data. The text can
comprise words or numbers or an alphanumeric combination. A single short
message can contain up to 160 characters when Latin alphabets are used, and
70 characters when non-Latin alphabets such as Arabic and Chinese are used. The
latest SMS standards released by ETSI provide an extension to send longer text
messages in SMS. This technology is called concatenated SMS.
An SMS message can also carry binary data. A binary SMS message
has 140 bytes of used data. This user data can be split into two parts: the user
data header and the actual data. The user data header can be used to inform
mobile phones about certain message types. This way SMS can be used to carry
operator logos, ringtones, telephone settings and WAP push
messages.
Although the main purpose of the SMS technology is to send and
receive SMS messages between mobile phones, it is possible to send and receive
messages between a mobile phone and
a computer as well. Ozeki SMS has been developed to help exploit this
possibility. The software can be used to create automated SMS services, or it
can be used to simply send SMS messages from popular desktop applications such
as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Outlook.
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