Cellphone texting problem

This may be a bit off topic, but I need an answer. This is becoming a real problem lately.

My phone is an old fashioned flip phone. It does calls and texts ONLY. That is all I want and need. Im elderly and like keeping things simple. For a short time I tried one of the so called "smartphones". Calling it "smart" is a joke. It did nothing but annoy me with ads, insisted I use facebook (which I have no intention of using), and wasted a lot of my time.

When I want internet, i use a computer. For a phone, i only want it to be a basic telephone.

Anyhow, Ive done texts for years with no problems. I know they must be no more than 160 characters, or they get broken into several texts. Not a problem.

Along comes the "smartphone", to complicate things......

Lately, I've been getting texts that I cant read, or large portions of them are missing. They are called ENHANCED. Whatever that means. Text should be nothing but plain TEXT, but leave it to technology to make the most simple things as complicated as possible. (and for no advantage).

I.ve told the people sending them to KNOCK IT OFF. Send me plain text ONLY. But none of them know what to do.... I can only assume its their goddamn smartphones doing it and they have no control.....

This is what I get.

-----------------

Text #1. says: ENHANCED MESSAGE NOT TRANSLATED.

Text #2 (and more depending on length of message) This is some of what the sender typed, with much of their message missing.

Final Text: PRECEDING MSG MODIFIED, MEDIA OBJECTS WERE REMOVED.

---------------

My reason for posting this is to see if anyone knows why this happens, and if the sender can do anything to prevent this. Until then I've told the senders to not text me. They are wasting their time as well as mine.

I really cant understand what "media objects" are being removed. What are media objects and why are they in a simple text message?

Reply to
tubeguy
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On Saturday, November 30, 2019 at 5:50:01 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@myshop.com wrote :

"Media objects" are pictures or videos or music. I still have the old fli p phone and it has a hard time with those because it literally doesn't have enough memory to store them. If you want to use a phone like you say, use a phone, not a smart ass digital device that tries to receive text. If yo u want to receive text you need to use a device that was made sometime in t he last decade because standards evolve and features are added.

If your smart phone was trying to make you sign up for facebook, you must h ave bought it from some outfit connected with Facebook. A friend got a Fir estick from Amazon but it doesn't work with every service so it doesn't do much for her.

Either learn about technology or keep rubbing sticks together to make fire. State of the art stuff means you will have growing pains all the time. S mart phones aren't really "state of the art" and mostly work. When you run into something you don't understand you need to have a friend who can help you with it.

The rest of the world is going to move ahead. Don't complain about being l eft behind.

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  Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

What I don't understand is why anyone would type into a telephone.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
jlarkin

If you watch them, they don't actually type. The wiggle and wave their fingers and words appear. Usually they are the intended words too.

No, I don't understand that magic either.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

Reply to
krw

The telephone was a somewhat controversial invention when it was created, a lot of e.g. business owners were used to communicating with clients at their leisure via mail or telegraph if it was very urgent, but still it was not immediate.

The idea that anyone could just ring them up at any time and expect to converse was thought by some a bit outrageous and improper.

They got used to it when they found it was pretty good for making money I guess

Reply to
bitrex

Yeah, you can drag your fingers around in the general direction of the letters you want to enter and it comes up with a word. It learns your "style" over time I believe and gets better at it.

Palm Inc. had a system like that for entering text with a stylus into the Palm Pilot in the '90s but it wasn't predictive.

It can be a particularly handy feature for non-English languages like e.g. Japanese.

Reply to
bitrex

"Smartphones" can receive SMSes with in-lined images but there's usually a setting that has to be enabled for it to receive non-text data over cellular, also.

Reply to
bitrex
[snnnniiiippp]

Two related issues:

a: if the sender is adding an emoji, aka one of those dumb picture images, that'll glitchify any text-only phone

b: iPhones, for some unfathomable reason, even if the owner is just sending straightforward text, convert this into some ugly MMS (Multi Media Shit) that even other smartphones, let alone text-only ones, have trouble displaying.

I have a different brand phone, and it'll show the header info, then require a "download" to get the rest.

This sucks in that I have to use "data" rather than "message", and... it will NOT work when I'm using WiFi but only succeed if I use my actual cellphone data signal.

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Reply to
danny burstein

The only satisfaction I get out of seeing "Glowy-face", defined here as some bimbo texting while driving, when she ought to be giving it some gas to make the next light, is that we (as a planet) have totally screwed-over that generation.

They like getting their information in short message bursts, usually from reliable sources like Facebook, Twitter and SnapChat.

And that nearly always translates into precious little depth of knowledge, about anything.

For example, the takeaway here would be: "Glowy-face, planet, SnapChat".

LOL. :) ...Next

Reply to
mpm

I have found that if you set your phone to NOT alert you, then people eventually get the hint that SMS is not a productive way to reach you.

The real genius of this approach is that it works equally well for other forms of communication. Don't like voice mail? Just let the mailbox fill up and forget about it.

Speaking of wasting time, have you ever heard about an app called "Slack"? We use it at work. (Well, of course I don't use it except to add one or two mundane update comments to some random Slack channel to give the mere appearance that I'm tuned in - maybe one entry a month.)

I only bring it up because if you have the opportunity to really immerse yourself in Slack, you'll probably fall in love with texting by comparison. I guess that's a way of saying as bad as texting is, it can get much, much worse!

Reply to
mpm

On a sunny day (Sat, 30 Nov 2019 15:34:53 -0800 (PST)) it happened Rick C wrote in :

Nanana.. :-) I have the same old Nokia and over here it still works OK on SMS. As I pointed out here recently: standards seem to be mainly introduced to sell more stuff over and over again of the same thing. Humming Beans (sometimes referred to as 'human beings') have a basic need to commie-nuke-ate or whatever the spelling,

Anyways I was in a meeting some days ago and pointed out I nearly missed it if it was not for my laptop getting the email, other guy showed me his 'smart phone' with the email on it.. I showed him my G2 ? Nokia ;-) That guy was 83 years old however.... So, one day I may have to put the battery back into my HTC android (but I find it a pain to use and all those things are way too big)... Until that day I check emails on the 'puter about once a day. Some have attachments... And my email database keeps intact that way.

It is the same with Usenet perhaps, there were times every clown used html in postings, that has become less, but every company thinks it is cool to send html emails with unreadable or not working links etc etc. I have been using the same email programs for 20 years: pine, (now alpine), and fetchmail, and have every email since 1998 stored and accessible, 'grep' is your fried for keywords and 'locate' to find things... who needs a stupid database,

raspi95: ~ # locate -i LM317 /mnt/sda2/pantel/root/compile...20/pantel/laser_arrow_com/LM317.pdf /mnt/sda2/pantel/root/compile/pantel/laser_arrow_com/LM317.pdf /mnt/sda2/pantel/root/download/html/155585-da-01-en-SP_REG_LM317LZSTM.pdf /mnt/sda2/pantel/root/download/html/LM317.pdf /mnt/sda2/pantel/root/download/html/LM317_switching-regulator-schematic.png

and that is via ssh from my laptop to a Raspberry Pi 4 that has a 4TB harddisk connected,

And this laptop: panteltje20: ~ # ls /root/mail/*1998* /root/mail/sent-mail-may-1998 /root/mail/sent-mail-jun-1998 ... /root/mail/sent-mail-nov-1998 ...

So not bad for compatibility....

If you look at the fvwm 9 virtual screens X interface I have been using since starting with Linux and compare it to the crap desktop Linux distros come with these days,,, I started up a very old Linux PC lax\st night for some satellite stuff, and got shocked how fast it was YEP is running Xfree ;-) Nvidea graphics card, almost forgot about it...

So newer is not always better.... And it is the player not the instrument.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sat, 30 Nov 2019 15:47:58 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in :

When you are on the move and have no laptop around then SMS is really cool. Confidential, not everyone on the bus has to know what you do that night :-)

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

This is a cute picture/video of my cat I thought you'd love to see.

It is very useful for sending asynchronous messages when on the move.

Slightly more urgent than email but not as much of an interruption for the recipient as a phone call. It is brilliant for sending a few readings from a remote site for example or fix a time and place to meet.

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Reply to
Martin Brown

Smartphones (and Apple Watches to a lessor extent) are fighting it out with iPads and Surfaces for client device dominance in the healthcare industry. Smartphones enjoy an edge when it comes to instantaneously communicating with health care providers in the OR during procedures, in the clinic during encounters, in the hospital during rounds, or anywhere else. It goes without saying that the exchange of images and video clips is crucial. "Finger paint text" is avoided by me whenever possible. Instead a full size keyboard and mouse are connected to my smartphone to allow me to "power text." In this configuration my Samsung smartphone is oriented in landscape mode and tilted back slightly so it can function as a tiny display monitor. Thank you,

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Reply to
Don Kuenz

I don't know how old you are. The post you replied to was about texts on a phone (which no longer works well for his lame phone) and you reply about emails on a PC.

Did any of that have an actual point?

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  Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

I didn't realize people were still typing texts. I speak into my phone aft er telling it whether to send my messages as an audio stream or as a text s tream.

One point which illustrates the disparity between the infrastructure requir ements for sending text and what is available... My voice is transmitted o ver the cell phone network at data rates to a Google server which translate s it into words which are sent back to the phone as text which then show up on my screen to be sent as a text message which is unbilled. Lol, I don't know how much it costs me, but it is probably more than when I paid $0.05 per text. Or at $10.00 per GB of data, maybe not. $0.05/$10.00 * 1000 MB/ Gb = 5 MB/text or 625 seconds of 8 kB/s audio. My voice for a text is le ss than 10 minutes so even using voice transcription is cheaper than my old pay by the text message plan.

Still, there's some irony in the fact that instead of speaking to the perso n I wish to contact, I talk to a server computer which translates my messag e to a text which is sent without any human element such as voice inflectio n, hesitation or pitch.

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  Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

On a sunny day (Sun, 1 Dec 2019 06:45:55 -0800 (PST)) it happened Rick C wrote in :

There are many thing yiu do not know earthling.

email is also text, FYI :-)

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Someone should invent a way to store voice messages. Some day computers might even be able to concert spoken words into text.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
jlarkin

Smartphones are used for both texts and emails. Texts are best for adhoc improvised bursts of information. email works better for more formal communication, in my case. YMMV. Thank you,

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Don Kuenz KB7RPU 
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Reply to
Don Kuenz

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