SMS changed to MMS on Samsung S3 mini

[Anonymous]

Hi

I'm new here so hope this is in the right place.

I have just updated my phone to a Samsung s3 mini (from a Galaxy Ace) and have found that I have to be really careful with the length of my text messages. With the Ace I used to be able to send long texts and it would just tell me how many individual texts the whole message was equivalent to. With the S3 mini, after the equivalent of 3 texts the message converts to an MMS which I have to pay for whereas SMS I don't! Also, the length of one text seems to be much shorter than I have been used to. I wondered whether anyone else has had this experience, whether there is anything I can do about it and also whether it could have anything to do with changing my network provider?

Thanks

[jonsie · Accepted solution]

Any text messages have a 160 character length and as you have found, anything over 480 characters is automatically converted to mms. Also bear in mind that smileys etc use more than 1 character. The S3 and mini do have the option of turning on the character count so it's easy enough to be aware.

What a lot of people are experiencing is sending sms to multiple receipients and being charged for mms as they are automatically being converted to mms.

http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/srvs/cgi-bin/webcgi.exe?New,KB=Companion,T=guruCase,VARSET_COBJID=52283,P...

[MI5]

If you download an app called "GoSMS" off Google play you can set this to not convert to MMS messages. The conversion is part of the software on the S3 mini (and other phones) and cannot be changed without using a different app.

[Anonymous]

Had the same issue here, really disappointed that we are not told this when purchasing the phone, took ages to find out why we were getting additional costs, then realised that we could not use the stock text messaging app (one that comes with the phone) without this happening.

So installed the Handcent app, changed the settings so that it wouldn't do this and hey presto all works fine now.

Still upset that we were not told though 😞