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Sending texts to Russia with Cyrilic characters? - Help!!

Buster_Danog
Buster_Danog Posts: 740 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
in Mobiles
Does anyone know how I can do this? I'm having a nightmare trying to find a way to do it from my phone. I would have to install the Russian language update on my phone, but this seems to be extremely difficult to do unless you are a phone software geek.

I seen Martin's article, which mentioned "Fishtext" for international texts, but I went to their website and they do not seem to support Cyrillic characters.

I can't believe how difficult and frustrating this is. :mad: I just want to send a text in Russian, so that the recipient will receive my phone number with the text, and will know I sent it. Can anyone offer any advice???

Comments

  • Buzby
    Buzby Posts: 8,275 Forumite
    You won't - at least not easily. Mobile networks support the most basic character sets for their own territory. As you clearly understand the language, a web-based service that allows free SMS to USSR mobiles is your bewst bet. For years thre UK networks blanked out accented characters simply bacause their software was not set up for it - Cyrillic will be a non starter, even if you had a handset that could gererate the code! As soon as the text hit the SMC, it would fall apart.
  • grumbler
    grumbler Posts: 58,629 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    edited 10 October 2011 at 10:46AM
    Sergeant_Troy wrote: »
    ...Can anyone offer any advice???
    Just use latin letters to write russian words. I think 'latinic' is very common there. You can use http://translit.ru/ to translate Cyrillic text to 'latinic' or vice versa.
  • NFH
    NFH Posts: 4,413 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    Using my iPhone, I've sent SMS in Cyrillic several times via Orange to other UK networks. Each message has only 80 (as opposed to 160) characters because Unicode uses two bytes per character. All you need to do is activate a new keyboard within the iPhone without installing anything new. The messages come out fine.
  • grumbler
    grumbler Posts: 58,629 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    edited 10 October 2011 at 1:01PM
    Yesterday I tried to send a text message with cyrilic characters from Orange website and it refused to do this because of 'nonstandard' characters.

    EDIT: just tried to add Russian keyboard to my Desire and to send a few cyrilic symbols to myself. It worked fine: sent and received, Orange.
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