Sending SMS in Foreign Languages e.g. Arabic, Greek, Hebrew etc.

Cell phone penetration is rising internationally. With the increase in handsets, being able to communicate with the handset owners in their own language is something that is becoming increasingly essential.

The first question that comes to mind is how it works when foreign languages are sent to mobile phones from a web site. Based on the reality that PCs fundamentally just deal with statistics, letters and characters are stored using a unique number for each and in the past these unique numbers had to be assigned through the use of encoding systems. As a result hundreds of different encoding systems existed, none simpatico with each other and none of them containing sufficient characters to deal with all languages. All this changed with the discovery of Unicode. With Unicode one number for each letter has been assigned (an ordinary has been set) and it’s network, platform and language independent. The appearance of Unicode standards and tools allowed web platform owners and developers to develop extra tools, which enables end operators to send SMS in their own language.

These applications are specially significant in the Middle East (Arabic), Far East (Chinese, Taiwanese, Hindi and so on.) and European countries where normal English characters can’t be used to communicate in data format such as Greece, Finland, Norway - just to name a few.

Prior to improvement of a user-friendly Java based application, users had to be recognizable with Hex and the conversion of Unicode characters into Hex in order for the binary data to be sent to receivers through mobile phones from web sites.

This now all changed for end users. The java-based application used for sending Unicode, allows operators to send SMS from the web site in the language their keyboard is set to. Once logged in, consumers have the opportunity to select whether they need to send their text message in Unicode or in English. After choosing Unicode, the consumer is presented with the chance to send their message in Hex or based on their keyboard settings (Keyboard input).

The procedure is very simple and user friendly - if your keyboard is set (for example) to Greek, you just type the message in and click on "send" - the text will be delivered to the receiver in Greek. Unicode is still restricted to 70 Characters, which is a GSM limit, but the use of 160 characters is currently under development.