iPhone/iPod Touch emoji F.A.Q.

  1. What's emoji?
    Emoji is a set of unicode characters with colorful smily faces and other icons, that is popular in Japan. You can use it as normal text so that you can enter almost all iPhone applications. However emoji is not standard unicode characters that is not defined in unicode standard. It means that different vendors will have different standard on emoji; currently NTT DoCoMo, au 及 SoftBank Mobile. iPhone/iPod Touch uses the emoji defined by SoftBank, the carrier on iPhone in Japan.
  2. Who is officially allowed to use emoji keyboard?
    Officially, if the user uses SIM card from SoftBank Mobile, the emoji keyboard option will be shown automatically and is allowed to enabled it officially. All iPod Touch user cannot use emoji including all japanese users.
  3. Why Apple disable emoji keyboard for the rest of us?
    Well, I think firstly the emoji are copyrighted by SoftBank, so Apple only allows SoftBank user to use it. In addition, in western countries, most mobile phones cannot accept emoji. To reduce the workload of technical support, Apple disables it intentionally.
  4. What iPhone can see my emoji icons sent from iPhone?
    All iPhone/iPod Touch with iPhone OS after 2.2 can see emoji, no matter it is jailbroken or not, emoji keyboard enabled or not. Moreover, most japanese mobile phone produced by SoftBank also can see it.
  5. What's emoji enabler
    Emoji keyboard is disabled if the SIM card in the iPhone is not from Softbank. However, there is an entry in the global preference of iPhone that can activate it. All emoji enabler just add this entry to the iPhone/iPod touch so that user can select the "emoji keyboard" option in the keyboard setting.
  6. What's the different between different emoji enablers in AppStore and Cydia
    No difference, no matter it costs 0.99, 1.99 or free. Once emoji is enabled, the emoji enabler is actually useless and can be deleted. The emoji icons and keyboard are developed by Apple, not the application developers. So it is stupid to ask the application developers to add more icons.
  7. Why I cannot see emoji in SMS, while both of our phones are iPhone OS 2.2+?
    Some carriers filter out invalid unicode that including emoji. If it is the case, there is no way to fix it.
  8. Will emoji enabler still work on iPhone OS 3.0
    It was tested that it works under OS 3.0 beta version, but it is possible that it will be disable in official release of iPhone OS 3.0.
Submitted by water on Tue, 2009-05-19 08:16
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