Standard SMS is sent using the GSM 3.38 character set and allows the sending of 160 characters for a single message, and multiples of 153 for longer messages. However, this character set has restrictions, and some characters like "í" (i-acute) will be changed to a different character, such as "i."

Unicode offers support for a much broader range of characters. It includes virtually every character used worldwide, covering international languages, rare European characters (like "í"), Cyrillic alphabets (e.g., Arabic, Russian, Punjabi, Greek), various Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), and even emojis. In essence, Unicode encompasses every imaginable character you can think of.

A Unicode message is shorter at 70 characters, as the special characters can take up one or more ‘standard’ character spaces. Your handy message counter will track all this automatically for you.