There is a new way to enable the Emoji icons on your iPhone with firmware 2.2.
The trick is to purchase the USD0.99 iPhone App 老地方冰果室 (aka “FrostyPlace”). This is an application that allows you to view the latest posts from an Apple discussion forum in Taipei, Taiwan. Therefore if you read Chinese it may be useful and if you live in Taipei it may also be relevant.
After you downloaded the application you then follow these steps:
- Start the FrostyPlace application
- You should see a list of articles, simply choose one or too by selecting them. After you view some articles you can go back to the Home page of your iPhone. There may not be any articles listed in the News section (first tab), if that is true you will need to click on the second tab to see a list of articles.
- After returning to the iPhone’s Home screen, click on the Settings icon to get into the General Settings.
- Go into the Keyboard settings.
- Choose the International Keyboards item.
- Scrolls to the Japanese item and select it.
- You should see three options and one of this should be the Emoji; enable it.
That’s it, you will now have access to the Emoji keyboard, by cycling through the “Globe” icon besides the Space Bar in the keyboard, where ever the keyboard is available.
If the Emoji option does not appear in the Japanese keyboard settings, just go back to the FrostyPlace application and repeats all the steps.
Any mobile phones in the world that supports the extra character (Emoji) set; most of them will be in Europe and Japan, will be able to receive messages with Emoji icons. These include the iPhone running the firmware v2.2 and above.
Note that this technique will not work for the recently updated iPhone firmware 2.2.1 at the moment.
Now if I can get Qik and BiteSMS on the iPhone 3G without jailbreaking I will be very happy.