As part of the iPhone OS 2.2 update, Japanese iPhone customers gained an extra function not available to the rest of the world: Emoji icons. Emoji is the Japanese name for “emoticons” used by Japanese wireless carriers. If you are an iPhone user outside of Japan, and disappointed by lack of emoticons on your own iPhone, worry no more as we’ve got some good news for you.

An iPhone developer by the name of Steven Troughton-Smith figured out a way to enable these Emoji icons to non-Japanese iPhone users. The process is rather simple but requires that your iPhone be jailbroken as the iPhone preference file must be modified to activate this special keyboard. However, once you modify this preference file and back up your device, the change will stick in all future restores (jailbroken or not) when you do a restore from backup. To summarize, you only need to jailbreak your iPhone to enable the setting, and later “unjailbreak” your iPhone and still enjoy the new icons.

Here is a quick screencap of some of the myriad Emoji icons available:

Quick note: Emoji icons will not be displayed correctly on non-iPhones as most wireless devices lack Emoji support. So if you were planning to send nifty text messages to non-iPhone users, chances are that they will not be able to read it. We’ve also run some tests using the MobileMe online portal which failed to display the Emoji icons correctly.

Follow these steps to enable Emoji icons on your iPhone:

- Have firmware 2.2 installed.
- Jailbreak your iPhone.
- Install Emoji from the iSpazio Cydia repository (this will edit the preference file for you, whereas the other method requires that you SSH into your device)

- Launch Settings.app
- General > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Japanese > Enable Emoji

And that’s it. Open your application of choice, click the globe icon to switch keyboards and enjoy your new Emoji icons!

We are working on a solution to enable these Emoji icons without having to initially jailbreak your iPhone, but have not found a good solution yet.  We’ll keep you posted and welcome any comments or tips!