Being charged for emoticons (smiley faces) as MMS/picture messages

[Anonymous]

I have had a good look through the forum but can not see anything like this problem.

A friend of mine had a large bill come through this month and contacted 02 customer service.

Basically she was told her bill was so high because she had used above and beyond her MMS/picture message qouta which she refused to except but was told that a Emoticon (smiley face) counted as a MMS/picture message.

Has anybody encountered this or confirm or decline this??

Thanks in advance

[Anonymous]

no one??

[jonsie]

My emoticons go as sms, however others have been having problems.

http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Other-Products-Services/HTC-One-X-converting-SMS-to-multi-media-message...

[perksie]

Get her to call again and check her charges in MyO2 first, being armed with some evidence should help.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that but the phone is a new S3 first month of charges. I am on O2 with a galaxy s2 so not sure what the difference would be. Using the emoticons that are available via the text message screens not a 3rd party app either.

Strange one!!

[Liquid]

Emoticons are sent as txt so I can't believe that would be the cause of the charges.

It's only once the txt lands on the phone that the emoticons become an actual picture.

[jonsie]

I'm using an S3 without problems so I'm not sure why some phones convert sms to mms with emoticons. There is an alert setting on the S3 to warn when a sms gets converted so perhaps the answer lies in the settings?

[Anonymous]

She is sitting next to me so just asked as well if the texts she sent were of a long nature over a certain amount that could be classed as a MMS but they were all short and sweet messages with smileys. 

Having been pointed to the HTC link above it seems a few people have had the issue.

We are both in agreement that if we deserve the charges then we will pay for it but this doesn't seem right.

Thanks everybody so far for your responses

[Anonymous]

That is interesting to know. thanks Jonsie

[Liquid]

It is a bit of a piss take messages over the character limit are sent as mms rather than two SMS.

Annoyingly there's no way we can test real time to see what causing the charges(12hours before they hit the bill)

I'd advise arguing it. Picture/video/not native smilies(third party) should be mms.

A native emoticon is sent via plain txt so cannot be classed as mms.