Cell Broadcast also know as Short Message Service – Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) is a service designed for delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area. Unlike SMS Point to Point which is manly a one to one service Cell Broadcast is a one to many service.
Some mobile operators use Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location based news, etc. The service might not be supported by all the operators; even some of the handsets don’t have the capability to receive Cell Broadcast messages.
One of the readers on my earlier post on HTC Touch wanted to know whether the Cell Broadcast service could be enabled on HTC. The service can be enabled easily on a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson phone and isn’t so easy to configure on HTC.
Steps to enable Cell Broadcast on HTC Touch
- Navigate to the following screen on the device
Start -> Settings -> Phone -> More
- Check the “Enable” box under the Broadcast Channels
- Click on the “Settings” to bring up the following screen
-> Check “Receive channel list”
-> Set Language to “All Languages”
-> Create a new item with any name and channel number set to 050 or 50 - You should immediately see the Cell Broadcast messages being displayed as message alerts.
- Cell Broadcast messages as message alerts are annoying and if you want the same to appear on the home screen, install the BatteryStatus application. Once installed, the application has an option to display the Cell broadcast messages on the “Today” screen
You can even optionally set the alignment for the broadcast messages.
- Once the above setting is done, you should see the Broadcast messages on the home screen as shown below (The message is next to the battery status)
Note: The display of Broadcast messages is a battery sucker ! As you can see from the above image, the battery was fully charged before I enabled the broadcast feature. Within a day, the battery drained to 18% ! Every time a message is received, the display light is turned on and this is one major battery drainer.
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Whats sad is that I do find the cell broadcast shown as message alerts very annoying and I’ve turned those off for that reason.. But now that I know about this application to make it appear in the today screen, I can’t install it. I can’t install any application on my phone. Sucks!
So back to using ur HTC Touch?
Raj,
Yes Batterystatus does a decent job of showing the broadcast info on the today screen, but as i noted in the last, this feature sucks battery like anything.
Not able to install ? So your activesync issue still isn’t fixed ?
Harish,
Yes, the iPhone owner made his way to my place last week and I’m back to HTC
Is it working in 3G networks (WCDMA, UMTS) or only GSM?
Hello
I have a HTC S621 and I would like to know how to permanently disable cell broadcast messages.
Thank you
Go to the exact same place as the “Tutorial” says instead of enabling it you click disable all channels
How to find SMS-CB on HTC-HD2???? Help me pls
Venuke, I find great your post and i´ve decided to post a translation to portuguese in my own blog. I put a note indicating your blog as a respect to author.
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