Something has changed with respect to phone technology, where my incoming text messages are getting truncated.
For example
From: <person>
Time: Thu Oct 19, 10:21am
Hey! Hope you have a safe jou
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From: <other person>
Time: Sat Oct 14, 1:00pm
Also I just woke up and proba
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The culprit appears to be "smart" punctuation and other non-standard-ASCII markers. For example, “ instead of ". Or, ’ instead of '. "Smart" punctuation can look a bit nicer-- and for quotes, more clearly enclose something. But they rely on character support beyond standard ASCII.
It is not all smart phones that do it, since I've received lots of SMS from smart phones which don't have the problem. It's some matter of hardware or messaging program that will insert smart punctuation by default when text messaging.
See I thought the thing forcing me to upgrade would be the death of CDMA and ubiquity of GSM (this phone is CDMA), not something like this...
I've gotten away with it so far by trying to guess what everyone is saying when it happens... based on the first 4 or 5 words of the text. This has been going on for about 2 years. At first it was only maybe 5% of conversations, but now it has crept up to about 25%. It has worked out okay since no one is going to wax poetic over text message.
My easy idea is to try updating the firmware on my phone to see if that fixes it, however the hell you do that. In the longer term, new phone hardware will be the only option. The best phones are made by Casio and Nokia... Samsung Convoy looks okay I guess. Ugh.