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A Limit on Texts

The Pre helps me avoid being a rude texter.

Matthew Carruth
2 min read
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Centro Text Message Entry Screen
Centro Text Message Entry Screen Matthew Carruth\CNET
Time for another little piece of praise for the new Palm Pre. When enough of my friends switched over to iPhones, I started noticing that I would occasionally get text messages from them that stretch beyond the 160 character limit. The result would be it getting sent to me across multiple texts, which would be quite irritating at times, especially if the last part of the text was just the last half of a word or something.

My Palm Centro included a character count on the text message screen to let you see how much room you had left. I assumed that feature was missing from iPhones. Either that, or some of my friends just did not care about putting effort into shortening their messages to avoid bombarding non-iPhone people with consecutive texts.

Pre Text Message Entry Screen
Pre Text Message Entry Screen Matthew Carruth\CNET
I later confirmed with other friends that the iPhone actually does not have an easily view character count on their text messages. Anyways, being acutely aware of hos annoying texts over 160 characters were to receive, a character count was one of the first things I looked for when I started texting on the Pre. It did not seem to appear anywhere so initially I was upset about that and was paranoid about shortening texts as much as possible to avoid accidentally going over that threshold.

Lo and behold, I had no reason to fear for on one such text that unavoidably exceeded 160 characters, the send icon changed as pictured to indicate that I was now into multiple text length. Kudos, Palm!