Emoji

Emoji is only available on Japanese phones.

so they have the different firmware or something? why cant we use it? its the same device isnt it? is there something that we can do to get it?

Why on earth did Apple not include Emoji for everyone? Everyone else with mickey mouse £2 phones can text proper graphical smilies like this 🙂 whereas us iPhone users are stuck with this nonsense : - )

You can send feedback to Apple that you'd like it - http://apple.com/feedback

I have a Japanese iPhone 3G, upgraded to 2.2 last night, and I can turn on the Emoji keyboard in International Settings, but I can't seem to display it when I create an email... ?!

I tried switching the language of the phone to Japanese... no dice. Does anyone know how to actually use this new feature?

Figured it out (thanks to a link on another thread in this forum): It's only available when using the Softbank email account in Mail. MobileMe, Gmail, etc. doesn't give you the keyboard option.

I tested it out a bit, so here's my summary:

1. Doesn't work with email other than Softbank (NOT free).

2. Performance issues. Naturally the first test I did was to try to send an email with every emoji on the keyboard. After just a few it started get really slooooow, like 1 second per character.

3. Sent email couldn't be displayed on my girlfriend's keitai. Ummm.... so what exactly is the point of this???

4. Emoji in line will add a line break, ruining the flow of the sentence. I confirmed this by checking the "Sent" folder in my Softbank mail account on the phone.

Summing up, it's rubbish. I definitely agree with Apple's prioritisation to get this feature on iPhone to penetrate the Japanese mobile market, but unless they get it perfect, the effort is wasted because no-one here will use this as it is.

Oh but this is WAY better than cut and paste for japan market, right? Because in Japan they don't use cut and paste, they just use Emoji, right? And they don't use MMS either, because, after all, they have Emoji!! Horizontal keyboard in mail? No: Emoji. Push for Apps? No. Emoji.

/sarcasm off

Apple does not practice prioritization. The iphone development is guided by a single mind, not user desires. Even the programmers working on this must just shake their heads in despair, forced to to shovel in nonsense in the face of a hue and cry from the userbase simply because One guy has a vision and the clout to prevail against all rational arguments. As professionals, they must be totally embarrassed. You can tell it in the quality of their work, bricking 20% of the phones with each upgrade. They must be completely demoralized.

It would be pointless to have Emoji on non-Japanese phones because only people you sent messages to with iPhones that support Emoji (or Japanese phone users) would be able to see the Emoji icons you sent. So say you live in the USA and texted a friend with a Blackberry they would not be able to see the Emoji icons. That is something that would have to be standardized. In fact in Japan according to Wikipedia "The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au and SoftBank Mobile, have each defined their own variants of emoji."

Message was edited by: Dark Fiber

actually... this IS better for the japanese market. no emoji has been a real deal-breaker out here -- it's like releasing a great-looking car with square wheels; explaining that i can't receive emoji usually results in me getting a slightly perplexed look, as though i have deliberately bought a stone-age delorean made of actual stone instead of being all flux-capacitated...

2.2 now has emoji BUT they've utterly f*cked it up by making it --so far-- only work between softbank users! send/receive emoji to docomo / au phones and it doesn't work! utterly ********, and they had really REALLY better fix that soon...

Emoji is NOT only on Japanese phones, there are plenty of articles now explaining how to turn it on on phones outside of Japan with very little effort. Google “iphone emoji” if you'd like them. It is true that, within emails, they do not show up on other user's screens unless the email is sent from and received on a phone with a Softbank address and account, but you can use them in other places like in notes as much as you wish.