[Huawei Ideos X5 U8800] t_d_z:
Why an SMS takes twice the space or what 42 means ?

I don't want to start an argument but I still think you're wrongly accusing people, but it is understandable since not every one deals with encoding problems between devices and globalization settings. So maybe we need to explain why google software architects had to make the choice to take twice the space for the same SMS when it includes non-English-ASCII chars.

It IS because google software architects know that not all the world uses English as default they change your SMS to become unicode when you use NON-Standard chracters. Unfortunately, ASCII chracter set is quite old and does not include every characters from every known alphabet (you know being 8 bit and being limited to only 256 chars and they DID inquire other countries for any non-English/latin based characters and included most of them in to the standard set). Anyways, the way computer systems works, you're somewhat limited to first 127 characters of the standard ASCII chars. Anything beyond that subject to change based on your computer system's globalization (or you might call it localization) settings. The later 127chars are subject to change based on your localization. For instance ASCII #158 is Ş for Turkish (usually :) ) but it is an entirely different char for English extended ASCII set and might be completely a different char on a different encoding.

So, if you send an SMS with extended char-set to another party, there is no guarantee that the received will see the same characters if 4you strict to old ASCII set. They might have another set of extended ASCII chars and will just see wrong chars that will often times make it very difficult to read a message. (I know since I live in Turkey and we have quite a number of special chars, At least 6 or 7 --excluding upper-lower variants-- depending of your definition to be exact, more if you're using very old words). So in order to fix this problem, you need to have a bigger and standardized character set that will include all the special characters from all around the world. This way you can send any special char such as "Ş, ş, Ğ, ğ, Ü, ü, Ö, ö, Ç, ç, İ, ı and they will see the same chars.

The only problem with that, you can not possibly fit all those chars in a 256 set along with other necessary chars (and without changing all the previous computer systems). So, comes the unicode char-set. It is a standard extended char set that includes (as far as I know) all the necessary chars to write in virtually any language. But it requires 2 bytes (16 bits) for each char.

That is why good software architects at google changes the char set to unicode when you use any non-standard extended ASCII char. So that it WILL be displayed as it is supposed to on any device with any language setting.

I've seen countless times when you send an SMS with Turkish chars from one device (say from a symbian nokia) to another (say a Windows mobile) and the text is just garbled. This fixes that problem. Unfortunately, there is nothing to do but accept the fact that ASCII character table is not sufficient to represent special chars in lots of languages but eventually, it is one of the most basic constants within computing world so there is noting to do but change the encoding to something which will cover it all : unicode.

So in short words, it is the shortcoming of the now-ancient computing systems and under-laying designs and standards that forces us software engineers to use unicode nowadays and trust me, it is not any easier to detect and change the encoding to unicode in case of any extended chars quite the contrary we need to write additional code so that users will be able to communicate easily with all around the world and with all possible devices. (And I'm talking about PC & MAc world so it is much more harder for google coders)

In shorter terms: be greateful, I know I am :)

Hope this clears thing up for all the people why their SMSes takes twice the space.

Edit: heeey, what do you know ? This site also uses unicode, so you can see Tuskish chars that I wrote. I was half expecting them to be garbled :)