Help Galaxy S4 use of emoticons in Texts become MMS

[Grazuncle]

Hi

I'm surely not the only one that has seen a recent TV consumer program where a user had a massive bill resulting from use of emoticons in text messages that suddenly become chargeable MMS.


I followed a suggestion to send as unicode but I still got charged for an MMS message..

Any clues on how to send emoticons and not become MMS? I know I can just do the smileys but never got this with my previous Sony or older Samsung phones.



thanks

 

[Grazuncle]

Now this is weird..

I could not send smiley icons cos it converted to MMS with a fee.. Now having gone to Lollipop I can send them in texts free.. but in a recent message I accidentally used a colon and bracket.. there was not any warning of conversion but on actually sending the 'text' it then stated MMS in the base of the conversation.. with the MMS cost!

This sure is a mess... I have the setting set to warn if a message becomes MMS (which worked previously, in KitKat..after I found the Tick Box for it) now it does not warn me that plain colon and brackets (I noticed that in the above message I put the character in for colon and bracket and the editor changed it to a smiley) is about to send as MMS!

I have to keep free from brackets and colons then... and use the icons. As I said.. Weird!