In case you can no longer express yourself in words, instead demanding cute Japanese emoticons to encapsulate inner longing and turmoil, you can sleep well knowing that the iPhone’s Emoji set has been ported to iChat. More »
The battle over enabling Japanese emoticons on iPhone has been a strangely passionate one. First they’re there, then they’re gone, but now they’re there despite having been told to be gone. What the hell, Emojis?
Typing Genius–an app for challenging your friends to a variety of touchscreen typing games–now also unlocks Emoji on your phone, so you can communicate exclusively in kawaii pictographs like Jason and I.
Emoji: if you’ve never heard of it, that’s because you’re probably not living in Japan, 12 years old, and a highly social schoolgirl. An emoticon standard that is widely used in the country, it was included in the iPhone 2.2 firmware on the SoftBank network, but not for anyone else. Apparently fed up with his lack of ability to graphically express his numerous LOLs, a developer has figured out a simple tweak to enable these icons system-wide, no matter which carrier you’re with. Naturally, to show anything other than unintelligible strings of Unicode the recipient’s phone has to support Emoji emoticons, but apparently all 2.2 iPhones, hacked or not, can display the icons. The patching process, after the jump, isn’t terribly complicated.
