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

[MI5]

It was a general statement and not particularly aimed at you - but nevertheless, it's true of modern society....

[Anonymous]

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@MI5 wrote:
Anyone can add an MMS bolt on for around £5 a month. The standard SMS limit is 3 text messages, so that is equal to 480 characters.
On the s4 you can turn on a warning in settings that sms are been converted to mms messages and hence save the costs.

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Cheers for that (the S4 setting), I will tell her to turn that on in case she does it again in error.  I'd seen the bolt-on for £5 for 50 MMS when I started looking into this earlier - hopefully it won't happen again after today!

[MI5]

The conversion warnings were added to all Android software at the same time as the software changed in the way that long sms & smileys were dealt with by the phones. Happens on all phones & networks so it's wrong to blame any one phone or network.
Many people use email, viber, whatsapp, BBM etc now which negate the chance of sending an MMS in error.

[perksie]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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 I'd seen the bolt-on for £5 for 50 MMS when I started looking into this earlier - hopefully it won't happen again after today!

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Whether it does or not is under your control and it only happened in the first place due to Google and the phone manufacturers, how that leaves the networks as "profiteering" I don't understand.

You didn't know the cause for this but you came here and now you do, research pays!

[Anonymous]

It's £5.11 to be precise

[MI5]

Some bizarre random 11p which I guess has something to do with a VAT change at some point in the past......?

[Anonymous]

I guess this was when vat went up from 17.5 to 20%???

[MI5]

Prob but can't be bothered to work it out lol

[Anonymous]

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@perksie wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

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 I'd seen the bolt-on for £5 for 50 MMS when I started looking into this earlier - hopefully it won't happen again after today!

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Whether it does or not is under your control and it only happened in the first place due to Google and the phone manufacturers, how that leaves the networks as "profiteering" I don't understand.

You didn't know the cause for this but you came here and now you do, research pays!

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Well as O2 are clearly aware of this issue (and clearly some of their customers are not and had no real reason to be aware of it), it would not have been that difficult for O2 to provide simple advice to be aware of this issue, even just an email to all new Samsung S4 owners on an O2 contract (and if you ignore it then that's your own fault)... good customer service.

It is O2 that are profiting from this rather than in this case Samsung, as it's O2 that are getting (in my case) an extra £50 for nothing... if they choose to reduce this due to a lack of clarity in the billing then i'd happily come back on and say so (and I don't doubt the other providers would've done the same either, not just o2).

[Anonymous]

I suppose if you really want to send picture messages (and your mates don't have whatsapp or whatever else), £5.11 for 50 isn't too bad - not for emoticons though lol!  I wonder if one day they may include MMS as a free option within tariffs (like texts are now).

Are the standard android emoticons on the S4 those green robot-like ones? I'm on ICS at the moment on a battered G300, and the standard on mine are the multi-coloured ones (like on Skype etc).