cell phone text messaging in chinese to/from us

[student]

Hi!

Having come back from China where text messaging from cell phones using chinese characters seems one of the most common ways of communicating, a friend of mine and I have tried it in the US.

I can send text in chinese characters to myself from my Treo 650 (using CJKOS & Cingular), but when I try sending the same message to my friend, he gets garbled junk, and vice versa. When I send a message back to China I get the message "Intended partys provider unable to process request at this time." When friends in China try to send messages to me I get nothing.

So:

(1) Is it possible to text message in chinese within the US to/from cell phones, and if so, how?

(2) Is it possible to text message in chinese between the US and China to/from cell phones?

Thanks,

student

[Prodigal Son]

I can exchange text messages with friends in the US by putting the country code before the number that I send the message to, but this only works in English. If I sent Chinese it shows up as garbled text because few people have Chinese language installed on their cell phone. If they had it installed I think it would work, though. But to get Chinese installed on their cell phone wouldn't be easy unless they have a very mod-friendly phone, I imagine.

[student]

Both my friend and I in the US have chinese installed on our cell phones (CJKOS on Treo 650...) so that doesn't seem to be the problem.

[Prodigal Son]

Maybe there's some kind of incompatibility with the service provider - if not in the US, then maybe here if you're using China Mobile or China Unicom.

[venture160]

Most US networks can't handle Chinese text on their networks, they aren't equipped for it.