Quick Guide: Enabling Emoji on Your iPhone
March 13th, 2010
Emoji? You may be asking, what are emoji and why would I want them on my iPhone? To assuage your curiosity, emoji are simply small graphic images of smiley faces and other items that can spice up your text messages, email, and more. Emoji is the Japanese word for these images and they are known in other areas as emoticons or smilies.
Frankly, many cell phones with far less sophistication than the iPhone come with emoticons already enabled so you don’t need do anything special to use them. The iPhone is different, though. Emoji are enabled by default on iPhones sold in Japan only and users in other countries need to do a little electronic dance to enable them. We’ll show you how to do just this in this Learning iPhone article.
In the iPhone’s firmware, emoji are essentially another keyboard set where all the keys are small graphic images; there is no need to type in punctuation to be converted into those cute images. Emoji first became available on iPhones sold in Japan with the 2.2 firmware release in late 2008. Shortly after this, a rash of third-party apps to enable emoji on iPhones outside of Japan hit the App Store. Many of these apps aren’t free, but a few are. Since you’ll only need to enable emoji once to get it working and keep it working even through firmware upgrades, we think that finding a free app for this kind of one-time use is a better bet.
A quick search through the App Store reveals well over 100 hundred apps with the keyword “emoji.” While not all of these will enable the emoji keyboard on your iPhone, the majority of them in these search results will. For the purposes of this article, we’ll download and use a free one – Awesome Emoji by Kory Hearn Software (link opens iTunes).
As a minor aside, there are some apps that have multiple purposes in that they perform another primary function and also enable emoji on your iPhone. For example, IM+ (link opens iTunes) is an instant messaging app that allows you to IM through all of the popular protocols as well as update your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and it will also enable emoji. So, if you’re shopping for an app to perform a specific function as you look for one to enable emoji, check for this type of functionality as you search to kill two birds with one stone.
Back to the free app, Awesome Emoji. Once you install it on your iPhone and open it, you are greeted with one simple screen with instructions:
The first three steps listed here are all you need to to do enable emoji on your iPhone:
- Move the switch at the top of the page from Off to On.
- Exit the app and go to Settings
- In Settings, go to General/Keyboard/International Keyboards/Japanese and switch Emoji toggle to On.
The fourth step listed in the app is optional of course, though if you liked how the app worked for you, feel free to rate/review the app accordingly in the App Store.
Now, when you’re using the keyboard in any app on your iPhone, you’ll have the option to use emoji. Simply tap on the button with a stylized globe on it to the left of the space bar to bring it up (note that if you have other international keyboards enabled in the Keyboard Settings, you may need to tap a few more times to get to the emoji keyboard).
Emoji are organized into 6 tabs, with the first tab reserved for the most recent ones you’ve used and this tab is automatically updated by the iPhone’s firmware as you use emoji. This recents tab can be quite handy since there are over 400 emoji from which to choose and you’ll probably find yourself using a select few the majority of the time.
In terms of organization, the second tab contains the smiley faces and other images to convey emotions (though why there’s what looks like to be a pile of manure with eyes and a smiling face on the third page of this tab, we don’t know). The third tab contains animals and flowers. The fourth tab contains common household items and food. The fifth tab has buildings, vehicles, and flags, and the last tab holds numbers and other common signage. Each tab has multiple pages of emoji and you simply swipe right and left to navigate through them.
The most important thing to know about emoji is that it won’t be visible to others in your text messages, emails, or anything else unless they’re also viewing them on an iPhone (or an iPod touch). Apple has implemented emoji on the iPhone in a way that’s not compatible with most other carriers and computer software, which is why you won’t see emoji sent from an iPhone in an email in Outlook (or even Mail on the Mac) or in most popular web browsers. Interestingly, both Google and Apple have created a proposal together to add emoji to the Unicode standard – you can read more about this proposal here.
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So that’s it! You’ve got emoji on your iPhone now and you can spice up your text messages and emails to other iPhone users. Questions? Suggestions? Give ‘em to us in the comments section below!
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