(keitai-l) UTF-8 encoding of e-mail messages to cell phones

 I'm wondering if anyone could provide some advice at to whether UNICODE
UTF-8 encoding is a suitable encoding method for mail messages to cell
phonesof all of the three carriers (NTT DoCoMo, KDDI/AU, and Vodaphone) in
Japan now? 
Having worked on computer projects in Japan since the mid-80s, I am familiar
with the earlier resistance to UNICODE and the fact that 7-bit JIS encoding
was the defacto standard for sending e-mail messages until recently. 

Are there any caveats about sending messages in UTF-8 that someone should be
aware of? 

UTF-8 takes 4 bytes to represent each character whereas JIS only takes 1 or
2bytes per character. Are there still any cell phones out there that
restrictthe size (I assume number of packets) of e-mail that tightly that a
reasonably-sized message might be truncated or mis-decoded? 

I know that several years ago some cell phones had a maximum mail message
length, but I believe that seems to no longer to be an issue w ith newer
models. Since cell phones are essentially "throw-away" items when they are
lost, broken or the rechargable batteries become inoperable, can one safely
assume the life expectancy of any given model is probably about 3 years and
that the older models that carried restrictions have pretty much all gone to
the recycle bin? 

Any thoughts, information or pointers to relevant web sites would be most
appreciated. 

Thank you. 

-Christopher Keener 
kamo, inc. 
www.kamoinc.com
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