Unicode (UCS2)

This 16-bit character format allows for a greatly extended character set which includes all the languages that can be written in the following scripts:

• Latin
• Greek
• Cyrillic
• Armenian
• Hebrew
• Arabic
• Syriac
• Thaana
• Devanagari
• Bengali
• Gurmukhi
• Oriya
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Kannada
• Malayalam
• Sinhala
• Thai
• Lao
• Tibetan
• Myanmar
• Georgian
• Hangul
• Ethiopic
• Cherokee
• Canadian-Aboriginal Syllabics
• Ogham
• Runic
• Tagalog
• Hanunóo
• Buhid
• Tagbanwa
• Khmer
• Mongolian
• Limbu
• Tai Le
• Han (Japanese, Chinese, Korean ideographs)
• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Bopomofo
• Yi
• Linear B
• Old Italic
• Gothic
• Ugaritic
• Deseret
• Shavian
• Osmanya
• Cypriot

UCS2 is the Unicode format that is required for SMS, as opposed to the later format UTF-16. CardBoardFish offers a free Ascii to UCS2 hex converter which is accessible by logging into your customer account on http://www.cardboardfish.com, going to the Support section, and clicking Online Encoding Tools.

Due to the fact that each UCS2 character requires 2 bytes, the SMS message length is reduced to 70 characters. 140 bytes / 2 bytes = 70 characters

You must also set the correct Data Coding Scheme value, 0x08 or 8 in the case of UCS2.