Emoji Icons are Only available in Japan

well thats pointless then, arghhhh why do apple do this?????? drives me nuts

i know its not pointless for people living in japan 🙂

Wow that's too bad. I was hoping to use this when email my friends in Japan. Why does this have to be Japanese only? I think this is something everyone can enjoy!!

This is the thing I was looking forward to the most in the update. Very disappointing.

Me too. That was the ONLY thing I was looking forward to since I communicate with Japanese friends regularly outside of Japan.

It's a major disappointment for me. Boooooooo!

This is stupid. I frequently need to be able to switch between Japanese and English amongst other languages to keep in contact with friends and family. WHy should I not be allowed to use emoji characters?

It may be that non-Japanese systems don't provide the necessary character encoding for writing and displaying them correctly.

capaho wrote:
It may be that non-Japanese systems don't provide the necessary character encoding for writing and displaying them correctly.

That may be the case, but I've emailed from my Japanese phones in the past using emoji and been able to see them fine on my mac, gmail, hotmail, and yahoo mail. I think they are basically handled as embedded gif images.

But you do have a point. Because the emoji in Japanese phones are an old technology and only in recent years did they make them constant across all of the carriers in Japan. So there may very well be some specific encoding that would not jive well with non Japanese systems.

Could anyone with an iPhone in japan try sending an email with the new emoji to some non Japanese addresses and let us know how they come through?

More info:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2404

It's not pointless for people living elsewhere either. Emoticons are just easier than explaining sometimes.

Please give these icons to everyone! I think they are awesome to use

I agree, I wish this feature were available outside of Japan. I was really looking forward to being able to reply to my Japanese friends using emoji, too. Seeing them use them makes me jealous (;_;)

Please give these icons to everyone! I think they are awesome to use

Here is the place to tell Apple that:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Here is a link that might help.

http://k6o.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-use-emoji-with-using-japanese.html

emoji is pretty useless for anyone outside Japan.
For starters MacOS or Windows don't support emoji characters. So you type a emoji icon using an iphone, email it, and no one will be able to see it.