It’s a Bug but who’s at fault? Android 2.x or Droid?

by Rod on January 11, 2010 · 7 comments

by Rod on January 11, 2010 · 7 comments

DROID + ~ = No Character for you

I received a text message saying, “I sent you a text with part of the password, call me and I will give you the rest on the phone.” Not a big deal. I have done this many times before. Today for some reason, once given all the pieces, the password did not seem to work. After I started to manually read the text message, we realized quickly my Droid dropped the “~ “ in the password. This seemed odd. To dig a little bit further, I sent a test message from my Google Voice account with ~Test~ in the message. To my surprise I received “ test ” the tilde was missing.

Now I sent a message to my wifes Droid Eris

~~~~~~Test~~~~~~~Test

she received

~~~~~~Test~~~~~~~Test

She kindly sent me a message

~~~Leave Me Alone~~~

I received

Leave Me Alone

Two things came out of that test, my text was missing the tilde and my wifes message was clear. I am beside myself that the Droid is dropping characters from messages. Now, I cannot say if this is a Android 2.x or a Motorola Droid issue. Test it for yourself but the ~ is a no go with SMS on the Droid.

I know some of you may be wondering why I am getting passwords in SMS messages. Especially since text messages are in clear text so passwords should never be sent this way. But keep in mind I received only part of the password and needed characters in the front or the back to complete it so no big deal.

I tested this on my iPhone and no problem. I had Chris test Windows Phone and there is no issue their either.

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Tagged as: Android Smartphones, Bug, Dropped Characters, SMS, Text Message, Tilde

  • Melanie S

    In a similarly frustrating but completely different vein, Kijiji (similar to Craigslist) stopped sending emails through the site interface when I used my gmail account address which has dots in it… Best of luck to you figuring out the tilde issue. Does it work if you put the whole thing in quotes?

    • http://www.simplemobilereview.com Rod

      I have had a similar issue with GMail when I use the +. For example JohnDoe+Amazon at GMail dot com. That would result in a reject due to the plus despite it being a valid character. One of the best features of Gmail is the + option. Either way the ~ is a no go regardless of how I put it in.

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  • Josh

    Same problem here on the Droid X.

    Also, if I include an em dash (—) [which you can get by long-pressing the "-" key], the receiving phone sees none of the message correctly; they simply see a garbled mess of ?’s and -’s. This is a very annoying bug.

  • Josh

    I should also point out that I don’t have either of these problems when sending from a Droid X to a Droid X. So, evidently the iPhone doesn’t understand the way the Droid (X) is representing these characters while the Droid (X) understands both its own way and the iPhone’s way.

    I’ll test out both characters with my wife’s non-smartphone later and report back.

  • http://www.facebook.com/HalLevy1 Hal Levy

    I have the same exact problem on my Samsung Charge from Verizon