Mystery text messages

I've had my current cell, a Samsung Upstage, for about 1.5 years now. From time to time (like on my birthday, xmas, new year's), I would receive text messages from friends. But I only know the phone # that the text message is from, it wouldn't show the name of the person it is from, even if the person and his/her phone # is in my cell's address book, even if the person is replying to a text message I sent. So sometimes, when I felt like finding out who sent a message, I would search through my address book on Outlook, or scroll through the address book on my cell to see if I could figure out who it is. It usually works, but very tedious.

This morning, I received some text messages from friends. And again, I didn't know who some of them were from. Curious enough, some of them displayed a sender's name (something that I hadn't noticed until today). So turns out that sender's name is shown for those entries where I did not store the phone number with a "1" in front of the area code. For example, the name of an entry with a phone number 415-555-1212 would display, while the name of an entry with a phone number of 1-415-555-1212. It's not completely intuitive that while dialing 1-415-555-1212 and 415-555-1212 would work, though the phone is only able to match the 415-555-1212 format for incoming messages. Mystery solved!

(Photo by geee.darryl)