Okay, this likely has nothing to do with DC but just in case I figured I'd ask. I'm not a big text guy. I got to text messaging really just two years ago and started a bit slowly. Now I'm sending hundreds in a month which is nothing compared to friends so please don't ridicule the ignorance here:

Last night my Droid ran out of battery as it does from time-to-time. I fell asleep watching TV at 10:30pm. I woke up at 5am and plugged the phone in. A few minutes after that it powered up and a minute or two later I hear a text message come through. It's a family member asking, "Are you up?". I look at the time stamp. "Sent 5:02am". Hmm, it's 5:03am now. Is this person up and noticed I was online (which I was, checking my morning e-mail)?

So I send a text back.

After a few more interactions I find they sent the text at 11pm and now I've woken them up and the entire exchange was surreal as I wasn't sure entirely if the messages that were new this morning were just more messages in a chain from last night.

Has this always been going on with Android? If so it seems like a HUGE failing. I spoke with the family member and they swear their iPhone, after powering up, always displays the time the text message was sent--not when it was received.

What's the facts with this situation and is it at all possible to fix?

After reading up a bit on the amazingly few threads on this that I found I can't believe this is an Android issue! Some were saying it was a Verizon issue but then it became clear it wasn't. Non-Android phones all over are shown the time a text message was SENT, not when your phone happened to receive it.

I have a teenager at home and he's just starting to drive. This will give me a heart attack if it's not fixed. In fact, it's a big enough issue that, if it can't be fixed, I may need to drop Android and go to an iPhone (I can't believe I just said that but it's true). How on earth could this possibly have been overlooked? Correct timestamps are sometimes pretty damned important and this is one of those cases. My enV never had this issue but obviously I'm not going back to a feature phone.

Issue 2989 - android - Sent time in received SMS is receipt time of SMS, not sent time. - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting

Here's some more info on this:

I started digging deeper and find that the information in question is, indeed, available. How? Look at this:

http://www.handcent.com/News.php

Look at the third item on July 19th. "Support display timestamp of people sent the message now (classic android only include the timestamp that you received message normally) COOL!
(long press the message that you received,choose "view message detail" ,there has additional information)"

Handcent can display the correct information but you have to long-press a message and then scroll to the bottom of long menu and then select that item to then see when a message was sent. This is ridiculous. At least it suggests the opportunity is there. At this point I'd love to see an option from Droid Concepts that feeds this information to the Sent data instead of the Received time as it should be. Then all messaging apps would be right regardless of settings (or lack thereof).