Not wanting to be outdone, I went on the hunt for a better SMS app.įirst I tried Google Hangouts. They may take up more than one character, but you can use them in SMS messages. IPhone owners don’t suffer the same fate as I did, because Apple’s default messaging application doesn’t treat emotion icons as images. The BBC and Money Saving Expert are just two sites that have recently been warning consumers of the hidden costs linked to emoji usage. I’m not someone who does either, so when I tried to send a message (no bigger than one standard text message) with an emoji in it, I got charged 33 pence by my provider and worst of all the recipient was unable to receive MMS messages, so they didn’t even get to see my 33p text!

This isn’t a problem if you get a large number of MMS messages included in your contract, but most people (at least here in the UK) don’t. If I want to send an emoji, Samsung very kindly converts my text message (an SMS) into an MMS. The super-duper Samsung upgrade to KitKat may have enabled me to send emoji – yay! – but it came at a cost: MMS. Now I’m not against emoji, some of them are pretty cool… 🙂 The emoji on my Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini keyboard Oh and how could I forget, that annoying emoji/emoticon button! KitKat added a terribly annoying button to my keyboard, a smiling face, which whenever you accidentally click on it, becomes the default extras button that’s the lovely little button next to the space key that gives you the option of voice typing, pasting, visiting settings, and now also adding an emoji. There were a few other changes but at this moment they escape me. Some of my icons changed colour, my screen mirroring functionality seemed to stop working and GPS got renamed Location. KitKat was released in 2013, but because Samsung like to fiddle with Android before they roll it out to users – or as I now like to say, apply their Disney layer – kudos to David – it takes a while for their handsets to get the updates.Īpart from a few minor interface changes – some good and some not so good – I didn’t really notice much of a difference with the KitKat upgrade.

A few months ago, my Galaxy S4 Mini (click this link to go to my series about it) updated to Android KitKat – from Jelly Bean.

Textra web app