iPhone Emoji
30 Sep 2009
History
Emoji (絵文字) are Japanese emoticons first introduced in Docomo i-mode but since integrated into the mail and web services of all mobile carriers in Japan. Contemporary emoji characters are stored in the private use area of the Unicode character set but to make life fun for mobile developers, each carrier has slightly different sets of emoji all using different character codes:
The emoji is displayed on Docomo, Softbank and AU mobiles using respective e63e, e04a and e488 Unicode character codes. Messy, isn't it?
Fortunately developers have been dealing with this mess for years and there's plenty of emoji conversion libraries floating around the web but if you want to have a go yourself, emoji details from the big three Japanese carriers are available here:
iPhone Emoji
The iPhone emoji keyboard
Emoji support was added to the iPhone from firmware 2.2 but while all iPhones can display emoji, emoji entry is limited to users in Japan and only in Messages and Softbank mail message entry. Emoji entry can be enabled universally with a little com.apple.Preferences.plist jiggery-pokery but be warned that this turns on the emoji keyboard everywhere including in email and URL address fields.
iPhone emoji use the same character codes as Softbank emoji but are slightly modified with an iPhone replacing the generic clamshell mobile and no emoji animation. As with any emoji, the easiest way of incorporating iPhone emoji into a web page is to use its decimal character entity:  displays on an iPhone and
on other Softbank mobiles.
iPhone Emoji Decimal Character Entities
The complete list of iPhone emoji and their respective decimal character entities:
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To enable Emoji for FREE on your iPhone / iPod touch, you could do this: (works 100%)
1. Download Todew Lite
2. Create a task called "Emoji" (without quotes).
3. Follow on-screen instructions.
trying to understand what these emoji characters mean?
Emoji meaning can be ambiguous as they often refer to symbols only found in Japan. Google et al has proposed an emoji standard but I can't see this ever happening when you look at the difficulty of getting even basic symbols like road signage standardized internationally:
http://sites.google.com/site/unicodesymbols/Home/emoji-symbols/proposal-text
Kiwilani,
I encode all HTML entities to prevent HTML insertion in comments but I've edited your comment above so the emoji should display OK on any platform with the Softbank emoji font (iPhone).