iOS 4 features: Keyboards and Emoji
One of the huge advantages of iOS 4's virtual keyboard is that, for people who write in multiple languages, changing from English to Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, or other non-Roman options involves a simple Settings change. This is helpful for language students and business travelers alike. It can also be fun, especially when it comes to things like Japanese Emoji (think emoticons gone wild).
Kyle sent this our way:
When turning on the japanese romaji keyboard, if you return to the keyboards menu you will be given a new option "edit user dictionary" where you can add a new word/Yama (if I remember that right) to the auto-correct dictionary and I assume the spell-check as well.
After tinkering for a bit, I saw the Chinese Pinyin keyboards work as well for the dictionary. Now, while meandering through the Japanese keyboard, I saw this "^_^" key under the '123' tab. Tap it and you'll be given a gigantic list of 'emoticons' if you will and some of which include symbols like those of a character map.
I HIGHLY recommend you see these as some are a bit funny looking and it really makes you think why Apple would put these on here, and why so many?
We're guessing it's because iPhone is popular in Japan, Emoji are popular in Japan, and Apple's using the latter to increase the former. If any Japanese readers have a better theory, let us know!
More pics after the break, and more on iOS 4 in our walkthrough...
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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First!
But what happens when u send them to non iphone users? Do they see gibberish? Or the character?
mostly just nothing shows from experience, but these arent the normal emojii, you still have to download an app that can enable the keyboard.
Its worth noting though that the emojii keyboard IS NOT under the jap keyboard settings when enabled, it seems to be under its own name of emojii now. I found after using an app to enable it it took a reboot to become available but then worked fine. This is on an iPhone4 as well (and thus ios 4.0) and not jailbroken
In Korea all phones come with such symbols that allow those "emoticons". I assume it's the same in Japan. This is great as I myself am an expat in Korea, and after having used a Korean phone with emoticons, was a bit disappointed that my new-old (first ever iPhone only came to Korea in winter 09), iPhone had such dull list of characters & symbols. I'm just surprised that those emoticons aren't on Korean keyboards as well.
If you add the Japanese tenkey keyboard you get a sweet T9 keyboard when you hit ABC.
On my iPhone I have selected German an Emoji-Symbols in keyboard settings! Why can't I use or see the "Edit User Dictionary" feature???
what I want is emoji for iPad it's been out for so long and still no easy solution like on the iPhone.
The emoji keyboard was enabled using an AppStore app(which can be deleted after adding the keyboard) but the emoji from the Japanese Romaji keyboard [Like these kind: (^_^) ( ? _ ? ) p(^_^)q] do in fact send entirely to non iPhone users seeing as they're made from mostly standard keys. And the 'edit user dictionary' still is enabled once you delete the romaji or pinyin keyboard, it is only hidden. In order for you to add or remove more words you have to re-enable the keyboard and edit from there.
The emoticons discussed here (like "^^" or "φ(･_･") are usually called "kaomoji" in Japan. Wikipedia has a nice description about it. Because the Japanese character set contains a wide variety of symbols and characters in its repertoire, emoticons evolved quite uniquely.
Rene is shrewd in guessing "iPhone is popular in Japan, Emoji are popular in Japan, and Apple’s using the latter to increase the former."
Pictorial "emoji" set you find in your iPhone keyboard settings is different from "kaomoji". By the way Apple's implementation of emoji is solely meant for Japanese users at the moment. The emoji character set is totally implementation dependent and not yet standardized. You will face problems if you try to exchange emoji with users on different platform.
@Ash, I was able to send a handful of the emoji (which included ones with smiles and stars and the like symbols) in complete success. I wonder maybe not all devices can receive these? Purely constructive response, did you verify they cannot be sent?
Kyle, did you mean kaomoji like "^_^", or colorful pictorial emoji from emoji keyboard?
All of the characters used in kaomoji are regular characters with mappings in Unicode, so you should be able to exchange with other devices with Unicode support.
On the other hand, emoji (the latter) are phone carrier dependent set of pictograms. They aren't standardized even in Japan. If you try to email emoji to, say, Yahoo mail for instance, they should get greeked.
Hey, I'm a Japanese speaking iPhone user in Japan. I'll be happy to help you solve your questions.
Kyle, I just figured you ARE the one with the original post (^^);
So what you meant was "kaomoji", and all of the characters and symbols used in kaomoji are from commonly used character sets in Japan, so recent devices including iPhone, Mac and PC should have no problem handling them.
One question, why when I want to do anything with the Japanese keyboard such as tapping the ^_^ icon my iPod just stays stuk then blacks out then goes back to home.
In other words I can't use it. Even the Ten Key keyboard.
When I try and enable the Japanese Romaji or Chinese Pinyin keyboard, there does not seem to be an option to add words to the custom dictionary, just says that there are no words in this current one like so: http://i28.tinypic.com/20koy2o.png
Can you or can you not add words to the standard English dictionary?
I want to install japanese Romanji keyboard for google translation on my android smart phone. Can you help me how to install ? Thanks
Cool.
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