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.