Segment Lengths

Segment lengths are often impacted by special characters such as emojis or unicode. Use of bold or italics will also affect segment length. Typically, shorter messages are better. Without special characters, the first segment can be up to 160 characters. With special characters, the first segment can be 70 characters. Subsequent segments will be shorter, as the mobile carriers reserve a few characters per segment to "stitch" the message back together on the handset.