[mrmcd]

My girlfriend is from Turkey, and I shared this story with her a while back (I discovered it while also researching some Unicode collision issues.) She said that while it's an entertaining story, there's almost certainly a bit of sensationalism and exaggeration from the Turkish press combined with credulity by English language journalists when re-reporting it. Basically, the supposed texts wouldn't have made sense in terms of grammar and syntax with a straightforward dotless/dotted I swap, and would've been obvious to someone fluent in Turkish what happened. This is would've been especially true if you had had this cell phone for any amount of time and communicating in Turkish and it had been routinely swapping Is.

More likely is a bunch of young and/or not too bright people were looking for a reason to get into a violent confrontation. Then the muckraking Turkish press had a sensationalist murder-suicide lovers quarrel story, and as a bonus a nationalistic "see how cell phone companies don't respect our culture" angle as the cherry on top.

However, you should still ALWAYS be careful when converting between character sets and be locality aware when manipulating strings. Practice string safety. ;)