Frequently Asked Questions

Sending Text Messages

Can I send a text in Russian, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese?

Certain character sets including Russian (Cyrillic), Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, are not included in the standard mobile phone character set.

Mobile phone text messages use a special character set which allows up to 160 7-bit characters. This character set includes the standard Roman alphabet plus their accented forms, certain special characters and the Greek alphabet. But there is no space left for Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese.

However there is a 16-bit character set called unicode which embraces Cyrllic, Arabic, Japanese and much else besides. Text messages can be sent in unicode, however using this character set your message is restricted to a maximum of 70 characters per text!

You can send longer text messages and our system will split the message into two or at most three separate texts. The longest messages using unicode is 201 characters which takes three text messages.

NOTE 1: If you use email to send and you want to send in unicode then you will need to enable this option.

NOTE 2: MagicMessage does not support unicode but its replacement TextMagic Messenger does.