Jailbreak iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Emoji, emoticons and pictorial characters popular in the Japanese instant messaging culture, were introduced to Japanese customers as part of the iPhone 2.2 Firmware update, but have required workarounds to be enabled for non-Japanese users. There are many solutins to turn Emiji Icons (Get Emoji Icons for free), but the easy one required jailbreaking. Recently Apple approved an application that simplifies this process. App is called EmotiFun and it is free (AppStore link).

Everything is simple: get app, run it, exit and go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese and enable.

First of all these icons can be viewed on any iPhone with 2.2 firmware. But to be able to send these icons users need to perform additional actions. There are 4 ways to turn them on and 2 of them are free:

Solution N1 for $5.99:

In AppStore buy and install Touch Dial Emoji. Goto Settings -> Touch Dial -> Enable Smiley icon ON. Launch Touch Dial. Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese and enable “Emoji.”

Solution N2 for $0.99:

In AppStore buy and install FrostyPlace. Play with the app for a minute to activate, click on a story, etc. Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese and enable “Emoji.”

Solution N3 for Free:

Jailbreak your iPhone. Run Cydia and install Emoji application (iSpazio repository). Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese and enable “Emoji.”

This application adds boolean ‘true’ key KeyboardEmojiEverywhere edits in /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist. You can do it manually if you want.

Solution N3 for Free:

Step 1. Download the vcard.vcf here.
Step 2. Import it to your address book program. If you are using Windows, you may want to do it on iPhone directly. Send the vcard.vcf file to yourself. Open in on iPhone’s Email.app, click the vcf file and import all the contacts.
Step 3. Go into “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard” > “Japanese Keyboard”. Enable the QWERTY keyboard.
Step 4. In notes or any other program you want. Type “emojia”, “emojii” or “emojiu” to select those icons.

I like Solution N3. It is free and simple. You do not need to play with contacts and etc. But you need to jailbreak an iPhone.

Apple released firmware version 2.2 beta 1 a bit more than a week ago. Couple more features were hiden there.

First of all Apple has addressed one common request within the iPhone’s Keyboard settings, allowing users to disable the iPhone’s auto-correction.

The other feature is for Japanese market – Japanese emoji icons. The lack of emoji support has been blamed as part of the reason for slow iPhone adoption in Japan.

The third new feature is Street View. It allows users to view panoramic street level photographs in select cities within the Google Maps application.

Hopefully we will see more new features in this and next beta’s of 2.2 firmware.

via macrumors

Related articles:

• Firmware 2.2 – new Safari interface
• Jailbreak on firmware 2.2 beta 1
• Auto-correction – solution to turn it off