There's not exactly much in the way of official statements on the matter just yet, but it looks like support forums have been piling up with reports of text messaging problems on the HTC Hero over the past few weeks, and with no signs of a fix in sight. Apparently, the phone can send texts just fine, but runs into a little trouble when it comes to receiving 'em, with most folks reporting only intermittent problems, and at least some not receiving any at all. Interestingly, the problem seems to be occurring in both the US and the UK, so it would seem to be a problem on the phone's end and not the carrier's, and a few people seem to have had some (brief) success after resetting the device. Of course, there are also plenty of folks having no problems at all, but there doesn't seem to be any question that the issue is out there. So, have you been missing some texts on your Hero? Let us know in comments.

Never mind "nickel and diming" -- Indian joint venture Tata DoCoMo is now rupee and paising (a paise is a hundredth of a rupee) customers who sign up for its new "Diet-SMS" messaging plan. Unlimited and ultra-high-allowance messaging plans are now commonplace in some parts of the world, but on the other end of the spectrum, Diet-SMS is actually a regression from the old practice of charging by the message -- you get charged by the character. The good news is they don't charge for spaces and characters are just a single paise each, which works out to about two-hundredths of a US cent at current conversion rates -- but still, the fact remains that a 160-character SMS costs Tata DoCoMo exactly the same to handle as a 1-character one. What's worse, you just know this is going to give rise to a new ultra-efficient shorthand notation that makes "LOL" look like a novella.

[Via textually.org]

Remember that alleged SMS-based security hole on the iPhone allowing evil-doers to execute arbitrary code and do all sorts of nasty crap like create an army of mobile zombies ready and willing to execute a DoS attack? The guy who found it, security expert Charlie Miller, said that he'd reveal the details of it at Black Hat -- and Black Hat's this week. Sure enough, Miller and his cohorts plan to unleash details of the hack today, and while they claim they informed Apple of the problem over a month ago, Cupertino's yet to make a move. We'd stop short of suggesting iPhone owners all turn off their handsets and take themselves firmly off the grid and into a completely disconnected underground bunker the moment the attack becomes public, but if it's as serious as Miller claims, it definitely bumps up the pressure on Apple to get a fix out on the double -- preferably before 3.1 drops.

Given the hype surrounding Apple's iPhone, we're actually surprised that we haven't seen more holes to plug over the years. In fact, the last major iPhone exploit to take the world by storm happened right around this time two years ago, and now -- thanks to OS X security expert Charlie Miller -- we're seeing yet another come to light. Over at the SyScan conference in Singapore, Mr. Miller disclosed a hole that would let attackers "run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network in order to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Charlie's planning to detail the vulnerability in full at the upcoming Black Hat conference, but Apple's hoping to have it all patched up by the end of this month.

[Via HotHardware]

We're all for closing the gap between our desktop and mobile WPMs, but this might be a step in the wrong... direction (keep reading to understand why that was a miserable, unforgivable pun). HTC has filed for a patent that would have your phone determine which character you meant to type by analyzing its current tilt at the time you press a key, the idea being that a single key could be responsible for entering as many as five different letters and numbers. It seems like that'd make entering a text more like a game of Labarynth than an actually enjoyable (or efficient) process, but hey, we guess some people are really good with their wrists.

[Via pocketnow.com and wmpoweruser.com]

So Boost Mobile's $50 per month free for all hasn't gone exactly as planned, with a surge in the carrier's customer base exacerbating excessive text message delays that have been known to plague Boost and Nextel in the past. The house of "Where You At" has acknowledged the issue, with spokesperson John Votava telling the Wall Street Journal there'll be a fix in place specifically by May 7th. He said the number of new customers that have signed up has overwhelmed the company, and with SMS a still growing trend, that iDEN network's gonna have to either get in better shape or wait for enough frustrated customers to leave and reach a more stable equilibrium.

The knee-jerk reaction to Verizon chief Ivan Seidenberg's recent inflammatory interview -- saying he doesn't know "what Sprint thinks it is" in response to Boost's blowout $50 all-you-can-eat calling and texting plan -- was to call him out for slamming competition (because, let's be real, no one likes executives hating on affordable stuff). His belief was that Sprint simply didn't have the network capacity to support a plan priced that aggressively because it'd bring too many new subscribers on board, and drama over on the iDEN airwaves suggests he may not have been too far off the mark. Boost resellers and customers alike are apparently experiencing insane text messaging delays -- sometimes several hours' worth between sending and receiving -- that are rendering the service useless, and while voice and push-to-talk are still said to be performing flawlessly, a strong swing toward messaging in the past 18 months across all US carriers (along with the upcoming launch of the Clutch) puts the spotlight squarely on the problem.

Texting has never been iDEN's strong suit; it's simply not what the network was originally built to do, and when we approached Boost about this at CTIA earlier this year, we were told that the situation was under control. A company spokesperson says that they're working around the clock to get the delays resolved and expect to have it smoothed out by next week -- but with the $50 plan continuing to win conquest subscribers hand over fist and a network that's being stressed in ways it's never been stressed before, we have to wonder: is this every going to be fully resolved? Even more importantly, though, with Boost's pricing undercutting its national-level competition by a country mile, do they even have to fully resolve it to keep customers on board?

[Via mocoNews]

Most buddies like to while away the hours by, say, fishing down by the docks; maybe catch the game and put down a few brewskis. You know, standard-issue stuff. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Nick Andes and Doug Klinger -- 29 and 30, respectively -- who decided that they'd try to shatter the one-month texting record by exchanging a whopping 217,000 messages, most of which were apparently meaningless garbage like "LOL" and "hello" (why they weren't able to maintain a deep, emotionally healthy conversation for the duration of 216,000 consecutive 160-character communiques is beyond us). Both men figured they were golden since they'd added unlimited texting plans to their accounts, so imagine Andes' surprise when he received a bill in a box -- complete with $27.55 in postage -- on his doorstep. Inside he found a grand total charge of $26 grand -- and while we totally think that a Guinness record is worth $26 grand, you can imagine that a couple Joe Sixpacks from Philly had never intended to blow five figures on a bunch of "LOLs" exchanged during lunch breaks. All's well that ends well, though, and T-Mobile credited the account and is investigating how it happened; let's just hope that record gets certified now, eh?

In an effort to bring the wonders of the world wide web to more remote locations, Nokia is teaming with Mobile-XL in order to pre-load handsets with the latter company's XLBrowser. Unlike traditional mobile browsers, this one relies on SMS technology in order to deliver "useful information, such as news, currency conversion, finance information and games." The software was designed to bring snippets of the web to handsets where internet, WAP and GPRS services are "slow, limited, and unreliable." We're told that a "select series" of Nokia handsets shipping to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania will be equipped with said browser starting as early as next month, though there's no indication of exactly which phones will have it and which will not. Oh, and you should definitely opt for an unlimited messaging plan should you choose to take advantage here. Just sayin'.

[Via mocoNews]

If your Nokia S60 handset has been stricken by the oh-so-cold 'Curse of Silence,' you'll probably want to pay attention here. Nokia has just loosed the SMS Cleaner on the world, not even a full month after the aforementioned exploit arrived on the scene. The handset maker claims that the application can "clean a Nokia S60 3rd Edition (Initial or Feature Pack 1) based device, which may have received a so called 'Curse of Silence' SMS message, and thereby restricted from receiving any new SMS messages." Installation looks to be pretty straightforward, and the file itself weighs in at a shockingly light 42KB. The read link's where it's all at, so head on down and get your sure-to-be-brief download on.

[Via IntoMobile]

Nothing too exceptional here, but the texters in attendance should certainly have a listen. Just a week after Rogers Wireless launched two new unlimited packs for BlackBerry users, the Canadian carrier has upgraded the $20 Value Pack (for standard handsets) to include unlimited texting, up from 2,500 previously. Like we said, nothing too incredible -- unless you've been burned of late for sending over 2,500 texts in a month.

kwiry's been helping texters remember things for well over a year, and now it's about to help them schedule TiVo recordings and update their Facebook / Twitter statuses. A few new kwiry shortcuts have been announced to make the lives of text messaging fiends more enjoyable, with a one-time account link between your handset and your TiVo Series2 / Series3 enabling a "tivo 30 Rock" SMS to trigger that very action. Additionally, users can now tap into Yelp and email contact information on the go, and as always, the service is completely free to end users. Hear that? Free.

[Via CNET]

C'mon folks, does it really take an in-depth research study to figure this one out? On the whole, per-use SMS rates have doubled from $0.10 to $0.20 in the span of three years, and carriers have shown no shame in pushing messaging packs (the "unlimited" one in particular) in an effort to snag more revenue per user. We already knew that Senator Herb Kohl was looking into the matter, and a new piece in The New York Times clearly explains just how lucrative these bite-sized messages are for carriers. We're told that most consumers simply assume that it's costing operators more each year as the volume of texts sent increases; according to University of Waterloo professor Srinivasan Keshav, "it doesn't cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million." You see, SMS messages are elusively hidden within the so-called "control channel," which is space already reserved for the operation of the wireless network. So long as messages are kept concise (say, 160 characters or less), they can be sent without any real implication on the channel. Will this epiphany somehow change the way we're being gouged? Tough to say, but don't think for a second that carriers won't figure out another way to nickle-and-dime you if the hand is forced.

[Thanks, Jeevan]

An Apple patent unearthed by Mac Rumors named Swipe Gestures for Touch Screen Keyboards suggests a future direction the company might be taking which would substantially change interaction with devices like the iPhone. According to the document, the new system would allow for simple finger gestures like swipes to the left or right to control basic functions of text editing. Some movements outlined in the application include a left swipe for deletion of characters, right swipes for a space, and a swipe down in place of the return key. Of course, these types of gestures are nothing new (and frankly, nothing patentable we suspect), as applications on the company's own devices -- namely the jailbreak-only MobileTerminal -- feature almost this exact implementation of gesture control, and Microsoft has had a similar (albeit stylus-based) concept in WinMo for years. Still, adding in this functionality to the software's existing tools would likely improve navigation and input, and opens the door for solutions to the lingering (and annoying) copy / paste problems Apple seems to have.

[Via Mac Rumors]