Multilingual SMS support in American GSM phones

I want to buy a phone (in the US) that will allow me to read, and
hopefully also write, Hebrew text messages in my visits to Israel.
Sounds simple, right? My tri-band Motorola C650 works fine voice-wise,
but Hebrew characters show up as black bars. I called Nokia, and after
some information-digging was told that no Nokia phones sold in the US
support anything besides English and Spanish. They even mumbled
something about government policy (DHS doesn't want to work hard
deciphering foreign-language text messages?).
SMS is always universal Unicode, and phone manufacturers are global, so
this situation seems rather stupid. Is there any other choice other
than purchase the phone in Israel? Affordable phones that come with
real Unicode support? Firmware flashing? Other ideas?

Thanks.

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› See More: Multilingual SMS support in American GSM phones

"Binba" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> SMS is always universal Unicode, and phone manufacturers are global, so
> this situation seems rather stupid. Is there any other choice other
> than purchase the phone in Israel? Affordable phones that come with
> real Unicode support? Firmware flashing? Other ideas?

I don't know if that's true or not. Isn't Unicode is 16 bit? That would
reduce the number of characters in an SMS by half (~75 vs ~150). There may
be two issues 1) the phone and 2) the SMSC. US SMSCs may only be set up for
8-bit characters.

--
Donald R. Newcomb
DRNewcomb (at) attglobal (dot) net

Binba wrote:
> I want to buy a phone (in the US) that will allow me to read, and
> hopefully also write, Hebrew text messages in my visits to Israel.
> Sounds simple, right? My tri-band Motorola C650 works fine voice-wise,
> but Hebrew characters show up as black bars. I called Nokia, and after
> some information-digging was told that no Nokia phones sold in the US
> support anything besides English and Spanish. They even mumbled
> something about government policy (DHS doesn't want to work hard
> deciphering foreign-language text messages?).
> SMS is always universal Unicode, and phone manufacturers are global, so
> this situation seems rather stupid. Is there any other choice other
> than purchase the phone in Israel? Affordable phones that come with
> real Unicode support? Firmware flashing? Other ideas?

First of all, SMS is not unicode. It's ASCII. Second buying a cell phone
in the U.S. and importing it into Israel is illegal. The ministry of
communications only allows in phones that have passed tests. To prevent
you from setting yourself up as an importer, the phones usually have
slightly different model numbers, such as a "minus I" suffix.

There is an excemption for tourists, and the post office usually does
not care. If you bring the phone in in your pocket, you probably won't
get stopped, but you never know.

If you try to import the phone via a courier service such as DHL, you will
need to get an import permit for it. Been there, done that.

While the idea is to protect the cell phone system from untested and possibly
faulty phones, the effect is to create a system of limiting who imports cell
phones, like Stiematsky's limitations on books.*

Hebrew support is not unicode anyway. It's the upper end of the ASCII
character set. The same part that is used for Cyrillic, Arabic, etc.

If you were able to get a flash image of a Hebrew phone that matched
the flash image of a U.S. phone and replaced it, you might be able
to get Hebrew to work. Or you might have a paperweight.

In my experience the cost of the flashing equipment is more than the
difference in price between buying the phone in Israel and buying it
in the U.S. YMMV.

Geoff.

* Stiemastky is the largest new book dealer in the country. They will
stop buying books from distributers or publishers who sell to other
retail bookstores in the country, effectively keeping a monopoly
on new books. They even sucessfully lobbied to have any shipment of
books over $35 be taxed on the total cost of the shipment, including
postage, wrapping, etc.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [email protected] N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/

Thanks for all the replies.

For "Me": When you say your Nokia supports the full character set, does
it support all 65,000 characters? Can it display Arabic, Hebrew, or
Chinese etc.? If it does and it was purchased in the US, that
contradicts what Nokia told me.
I would like to buy a phone in the US and use it in Israel.

For Geoffrey S. Mendelson:

First, SMS is PDU, not ASCII, it can operate in either 7/8-bit mode or
16-bit UCS2 mode. From the Unicode website: "for the purposes of data
exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats. Both are 16-bit, and
have exactly the same code unit representation."
Hebrew SMS support in Israel uses UCS2. Leave ASCII for the DOS days.

Second, buying a cell phone in the U.S. and importing it into Israel is
legal. The ministry of communications allows individuals to import up
to 3 units, if the models are approved for operation in Israel. There
is a list of about 500 models which are automatically approved.

And the post office doesn't have to do with import, it's Customs.


For everyone:

Yes, Hebrew SMS is made possible with Unicode. I still have an Ericsson
T28 purchased in Israel, which supports English, Hebrew, Arabic, and
Greek, among other languages. You get 70 chars per message.

It seems to me that the problem is not the GSM multilingual support,
rather the fonts that the manufacturers install in their phones -
Hebrew messages show up fine on my PC, when downloaded off my
Hebrew-incapable C650.

I'll contact the Israeli GSM carrier and ask about flashing the
language set, though I have the feeling it really wouldn't be worth it.

Binba wrote:
> Second, buying a cell phone in the U.S. and importing it into Israel is
> legal. The ministry of communications allows individuals to import up
> to 3 units, if the models are approved for operation in Israel. There
> is a list of about 500 models which are automatically approved.

The customs people have a saying, one or two is for personal use,
three and more are for business. I expect this one was forced on them
which is fine in my book.

As for the list, do you have a copy or a place to find it?

The list is often Israel specific, it includes models that are
xxx-i (Israeli versions).

> And the post office doesn't have to do with import, it's Customs.

But... The post office has it's own rules about enforcing customs
regulations. They are pretty lax about it, they try to avoid anoying
or charging the private individual.


The courier services have an unwritten deal where they
charge the highest possible duty on a package and make it the most
difficult for you. They really want business for customers not private
individuals. Business can get back the taxes they pay, so they
don't complain.


The one time I did deal personaly with customs they refused to show me the
list. They insisted the phone was not on it and I had to get a permit
from one Alon Bar-Sela at the MOC. They also would not believe that Bar-Sela
had left that job over a year before.

I also had to deal with them and DHL over a cell phone from Korea that
was not approved. I was looking at it to port games to it as it was
also a pocket PC. We eventually got it in the country, but we had to
declare that it was not for cell phone use and pay a hefty import duty.

If it had been sent via the post office, it would have come in for
free with no hassle.

I once had to pay $15 import duty on a free software CD because customs
declared that all CDs had a minimum value. The post office would have
delivered it for free.

> I'll contact the Israeli GSM carrier and ask about flashing the
> language set, though I have the feeling it really wouldn't be worth it.

It probably won't. Orange will be helpful but not do anything. Cell-Com
will tell you it's impossible, and Pelephone will hire a collection
agency to make you pay them, even if you never had an account with them.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [email protected] N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/

"Binba" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Thanks for all the replies.
>
> For "Me": When you say your Nokia supports the full character set, does
> it support all 65,000 characters? Can it display Arabic, Hebrew, or
> Chinese etc.? If it does and it was purchased in the US, that
> contradicts what Nokia told me.
I am only talking about my phone which is a Nokia S60 model for the European
market. I hardly am familiar with other than ASCII set of characters myself,
I can just recognise from the phone if it switches to unicode or not for
certain characters. My phone only supports major European languages, the
characters I see (and can be typed to a message) do not look like covering
Hebrew, although I might be wrong because I don't really have a glue how
those look like.

A pity that I cannot test which set of unicode characters my phone supports
for received messages. And I have no option to test a Hebrew language
version. Sorry about that.

And I see you are an expert on this issue too, I mean in addition to John. I
would say my input is mainly that at least a Euro Nokia phone does allow
unicode character input and then of course also displays unicode messages,
the portion of supported unicode characters remains unknown to me.

Considering what Nokia US tells about Nokia, this normally does not mean
Nokia but "Nokia US", a bit similar elsewhere too, they would not know too
much about other markets and what a single device can do when operator
branding is "removed", which language packages actually are available
(generally) etc.

I hope you find a phone that serves you well both using Hebrew and English.

> I would like to buy a phone in the US and use it in Israel.
>
> For Geoffrey S. Mendelson:
>
> First, SMS is PDU, not ASCII, it can operate in either 7/8-bit mode or
> 16-bit UCS2 mode. From the Unicode website: "for the purposes of data
> exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats. Both are 16-bit, and
> have exactly the same code unit representation."
> Hebrew SMS support in Israel uses UCS2. Leave ASCII for the DOS days.
>
> Second, buying a cell phone in the U.S. and importing it into Israel is
> legal. The ministry of communications allows individuals to import up
> to 3 units, if the models are approved for operation in Israel. There
> is a list of about 500 models which are automatically approved.
>
> And the post office doesn't have to do with import, it's Customs.
>
>
> For everyone:
>
> Yes, Hebrew SMS is made possible with Unicode. I still have an Ericsson
> T28 purchased in Israel, which supports English, Hebrew, Arabic, and
> Greek, among other languages. You get 70 chars per message.
>
> It seems to me that the problem is not the GSM multilingual support,
> rather the fonts that the manufacturers install in their phones -
> Hebrew messages show up fine on my PC, when downloaded off my
> Hebrew-incapable C650.
>
> I'll contact the Israeli GSM carrier and ask about flashing the
> language set, though I have the feeling it really wouldn't be worth it.
>

Me wrote:

> I am only talking about my phone which is a Nokia S60 model
> for the European market. I hardly am familiar with other than
> ASCII set of characters myself, I can just recognise from the
> phone if it switches to unicode or not for certain characters.

I'm going to be pedantic here, and point out that any individual
message can consist of characters of one alphabet only. An SMS
is either wholly 7-bit, 8-bit or 16-bit. They are mutually
exclusive.

It can't change mid-stream because the embedded Data Coding
Scheme (DCS) parameter applies to the entire message. See
section 4 of GSM 03.38 (or 3GPP 23.038).

> My phone only supports major European languages, the
> characters I see (and can be typed to a message) do not look
> like covering Hebrew, although I might be wrong because I
> don't really have a glue how those look like.

You can see them at http://www.unicode.org/charts/

> A pity that I cannot test which set of unicode characters my
> phone supports for received messages. And I have no option to
> test a Hebrew language version. Sorry about that.

Are you able to use "AT" serial "modem" commands on your phone,
via serial cable, IrDA or Bluetooth? Is so, I should be able
to give you a command to write a "received" Unicode message
directly into your SMS inbox.

The ability to directly write any SMS to/from anyone, saying
anything, is a part of the GSM standards (argument "<stat>" in
"+AT+CMGW", GSM 07.05, clause 4.4). Aside from other uses, it
facilitates the direct copying of existing messages between
phones and/or SIMs.

John

"John Henderson" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Me wrote:
>
>> I am only talking about my phone which is a Nokia S60 model
>> for the European market. I hardly am familiar with other than
>> ASCII set of characters myself, I can just recognise from the
>> phone if it switches to unicode or not for certain characters.
>
> I'm going to be pedantic here, and point out that any individual
> message can consist of characters of one alphabet only. An SMS
> is either wholly 7-bit, 8-bit or 16-bit. They are mutually
> exclusive.
Doesn't add too much on the topic but when your write an SMS with a Nokia
phone, if you start with "normal" characters, the phone assumes the standard
SMS character set can be used. But if after a few characters you select one
that does not belong to the basic set, the phone would change to unicode. I
didn't mean the phone would change from this character onwards but sort of
starts from the beginning and codes all the previous characters with unicode
too. So nothing controversial here, perhaps I was not accurate with my
comment.

> It can't change mid-stream because the embedded Data Coding
> Scheme (DCS) parameter applies to the entire message. See
> section 4 of GSM 03.38 (or 3GPP 23.038).
>
>> My phone only supports major European languages, the
>> characters I see (and can be typed to a message) do not look
>> like covering Hebrew, although I might be wrong because I
>> don't really have a glue how those look like.
>
> You can see them at http://www.unicode.org/charts/
>
>> A pity that I cannot test which set of unicode characters my
>> phone supports for received messages. And I have no option to
>> test a Hebrew language version. Sorry about that.
>
> Are you able to use "AT" serial "modem" commands on your phone,
> via serial cable, IrDA or Bluetooth? Is so, I should be able
> to give you a command to write a "received" Unicode message
> directly into your SMS inbox.
If it is possible, doesn't necessarily mean "I am able to do it" ;-) could
try anyway.

>
> The ability to directly write any SMS to/from anyone, saying
> anything, is a part of the GSM standards (argument "<stat>" in
> "+AT+CMGW", GSM 07.05, clause 4.4). Aside from other uses, it
> facilitates the direct copying of existing messages between
> phones and/or SIMs.
>
> John