Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Enabling Emoji On A Non-Jailbroken iPhone

Someone kindly showed me this little tip this morn­ing and I thought I’d share, since the web is still rife with now-inaccurate inform­a­tion about Emoji sup­port on the iPhone with/without jailbreaking.

In sum­mary, if you’re a 12-year old Japanese school­girl or just a geek with too much love for little emoticons, you’ll be delighted to know that you can now unlock the full palette of Emoji icons on your iPhone without jail­break­ing, doing any weird stuff with vCards, or any other unpleas­ant activ­ity.

1. Open the App Store on your iPhone.
2. Search for “emoji” and scroll down until you see Doodle Star. Hint: at the time of writ­ing, it was one of only two free res­ults from this search. Its page looks like this:
   
3. Install the app. You might want to be on Wifi, as it involves a fair-sized download.
4. Open the app. You can play it a bit if you like (it’s a reas­on­ably enter­tain­ing game), but I didn’t bother (sorry developers).
5. Close the app.
6. Navigate to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards and scroll down to Japanese.
7. Hopefully you will see an entry for the Emoji key­board, as below:
   
8. Enable the Emoji key­board by tog­gling the slider. If you don’t see the Emoji entry (and I didn’t, the first time I tried), simply exit the Settings app, open Doodle Star again, close it and return to Settings.
9. Go to any text-entry app (e.g. Notes, Messages, Mail) and voila! The Emoji key­board now appears as an inter­na­tional key­board option. If you haven’t used inter­na­tional key­boards before, you’ll note that the iPhone key­board con­tains a globe icon — tap­ping this switches the input lan­guage. In our case it should now switch to the Emoji key­board, which looks like this:
   
10. There are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of icons to choose from — swipe from side to side on the icon area to show more pages in the same cat­egory, or choose from the menu icons at the bot­tom of the screen to change cat­egory. The clock icon on the left switches to a “recent” cat­egory show­ing the icons you have most recently used.

Note that you can unin­stall the Doodle Star app as soon as the Emoji key­board has been enabled.

I’m given to under­stand that the Emoji func­tion­al­ity itself has been in the offi­cial firm­ware since 2.2, but this trick is a little more recent. It should work on any iPhone or iPod Touch with recent firm­ware, but I have only tested it on an iPhone 3G run­ning 3.0.

Emoji work by util­ising unused space in the Unicode char­ac­ter set, and sup­port is some­thing of a grey area. Macs sup­port them, but I’m not so sure about PCs or other mobile devices. Check the Wikipedia art­icle for more inform­a­tion, or have your­self a little search.

Thanks to HT for provid­ing this tip and apo­lo­gies to the developers of Doodle Star for com­pletely ignor­ing the pur­pose of their application.

UPDATE: Since iOS 4 was released, these instruc­tions have changed — iOS 4 own­ers should fol­low the instruc­tions here.