Comments on: sms is a garbage protocol

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:40:43 +0000

Many of the problems that you are describing are due to either settings on your phone, or poor setup on the part of your provider.

Every GSM (+) phone that I have bought supports “Message Receipts”, which are sent to the senders phone when the recipient receives a message. Last week, I was sending text messages from Ireland to Italy, with total knowledge of when my girlfriend was receiving them.

Another feature of SMS that every phone I have ever owned is a message timeout option. I have the ability to set the expiration of my messages if the intended recipient never appears on the network; I have options up to 2 weeks, or “Never”. I have it set to “Never”, as do many of my friends. It is my experience that my network caches the messages for up to months, and then delivers them.

In case you’re wondering, these are not special features implemented by my network – they are available with standard Nokia, and Motorola firmware. If you don’t have access to these options, complain to your provider.

By: Cell-Phones: An Easy-to-Use Evil « My Humble Corner

Cell-Phones: An Easy-to-Use Evil « My Humble Corner — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:54:04 +0000

[...] skype, voip I read a blog post recently on Planet Larry, which describes only one facet of how cell-phones are disgusting. It reminded me that I’ll have to get one soon. All the same, it’s nice [...]

By: Boyo

Boyo — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:46:47 +0000

Sometimes those text messages are delivered days, even weeks, after they were send. For no apparent reason. Also, I would like to have a ‘night mode’, where I don’t receive text messages during the night. As it is now, I have to turn my phone off before going to sleep, otherwise there’s a good chance I’m woken up at 3 in the morning by one of those damn messages.

By: numerodix

numerodix — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:17:41 +0000

Yes, I read that a while back. But does it matter what it was designed as, or does it matter what it’s being used for, even 10 years or more down the line? I take the latter view.

And my phone doesn’t have anything like that as far as I know, so it’s clearly not a matter of standard functionality.

By: Mike Lothian

Mike Lothian — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:24:15 +0000

You do realise that SMS wasn’t designed as a messaging system don’t you?

It was originally designed to check your phone is still connected to the network, instead some bright spark though why not get it to send messages in these small packets too

Also you should turn on delivery reports that should take away half your issues of not knowing

Mike