SMS stands for Short Message Service and is another name for a text message. An SMS is generally sent from one mobile device to another over the cellular network. SMS is a text-only standard first permitted in 1985 in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standards. SMS Character length and Images in Text Messages One SMS is fixed to 160 GSM-7 characters, but most modern phones can group and reorder messages up to 1600 characters. The UCS-2 character encoding is used to accommodate emoticons and other characters outside the GSM-7 alphabet in text messages. One Unicode character causes the entire text message to be encoded using UCS-2, fixed messages to 70 characters. The permission was initially set because SMS was designed to conform to existing telephony protocols. After launch, the limit is set in the SMPP protocol. SMPP is the way text messages are transmitted between carriers. Short Message Service ( SMS) Differences from Multimedia M...