Yesterday, around 9:50am, I received a text message on my iPhone 3G. I opened it up and lo and behold, what do I see?
A fish, a soccer ball and a traffic light.
What the fuck could this be? After asking my friend how he sent images like that via SMS, he soon explained to me that these were Emoji, Japanese emoticons that are a huge overseas. Apple included support for these with the iPhone 2.2 update. The problem is, you can’t use them outside of Japan. Until now.
All you need is a buck. Head over to the App Store and purchase a Japanese RSS app called “Frostyplace.” Like I said, it’s a buck and once you buy it, open it up and click around for about three minutes. After that, exit out and repeat. After you’ve played with it for awhile, open up your keyboard preferences on the iPhone and you’ll find an Emoji option under Japanese options. Turn the Emoji on and you can now send these to anyone with an iPhone and they’ll be able to receive them. Quite good fun, considering you can send someone a pile of poop with eyes on it.
If you need more detailed instructions on how to do this, I highly recommend Justine’s blog. She seems to be the one who discovered this neat little hack.
