ossipena, just an idea. Being a native portuguese speaker, I usually write messages with accents. However, when you write a special character like "á", N900 (and every other phone I know) automatically switches from 7-bit to UTF-16, which is one of the allowed codifications supported by the SMS standard.

It's easy to spot when it happens and confuses many uses: the SMS composer shows something like '122 remaining characters' then it jumps to something like '31 remaining characters'. That's because with the 7-bit encoding you can have 160 characters in a message, while with the UTF-16 encoding you can have only 70.

However, reading the 3GPP docs, specifically section 6.2.1.2 of 23038 version 911 (the latest), I've noticed that there are many 7-bit extensions to national languages.

What do you think about implementing it on VertSMS, with a configuration option like 'econo-mode'? This would try and avoid the switch to 16-bit, reverting instead to the appropriate 7-bit extension table for the national language of the user. This would greatly expand his/her capacity to type and would mean many savings, specially for that people who send something like 300, 400 SMS a day.

This would greatly differentiate the N900 from other phones. I know of no phone that currently does that.

I am about to make some experiments with that, including a test with the portuguese 7-bit encoding to see if the SMS centers in my country support it.