MMS disabled on iPhone while overseas

[moonfruit]

My iPhone has MMS messages disabled.

I was surprised to find I'd been charged £8.20 to send 10 messages while in the US last month (Roaming plan enabled). Upon querying this with Customer Service, I was told they were MMS messages, not SMS, which is why I was charged 82p per message.

Here's the thing... MMS is disabled on my iPhone, and I've looked at the messages in question and there's no emoji, images, formatting etc... applied to them. In fact they're even labelled as SMS messages in the Messages app. What's going on?

[bristolian]

SMS supports plain text upto 160 characters, and depending on your individual phone config, can also support most emojis. Android can certainly be configured to support the Unicode alphabet which enables emojis over text, I have no experience of iOS - neither allows animated GIF

Most phones allow sending of SMS longer than 160characters to be sent & received "as one", but will be billed as individual 160character chunks.  So if you type, say, 800 characters, it will be sent as 5 messages but appear on both the sending & receiving phone as one.

I suspect this is what's happened in your case.