Emoji

This will be brief as I'm at work on my iPhone.

I was listening to a Mac Break Weekly today and one of the topics was about how to unlock the emoji on your iPhone. I had never heard of emoji and was intriuged to find out it was the Japanese phone version of our emotes, but with many icons, not just the smiley face types we have.

I went to the app store, typed emoji and lo and behold, some apps appeared which unlocked the feature on the iPhone keyboard! For only $.99, I bought an app and now I can use emoji! The downside is that I only iPhone users and cells in Japan can see the emoji. That means everyone needs to get an iPhone!

However, there's a rumor that Apple wants to disable emoji. Why? No clue. But since everyone in Japan uses emoji, that doesn't seem like a good idea. And if it's only to do it to U.S. iPhones, why kill our fun? Makes no sense. I hope that rumor isn't true.

Update: Ok, so it was a MacBreak Weekly from February that I just got around to hearing and yes, at the start of March/end of Feb, Apple did issue a shut down order to all apps that were created with the emoji functionality. So until the new ROM, my emoji will work! I love Apple, but what a killjoy they can be sometimes! Big thumbs down for that silly shutdown that had no impact on them whatsoever.

Update to my update: I have no idea if emoji will be disabled or not now. After reading several sites, some say it's over but those posts were early March, while others have comments that iPhone 3.0 actually has it included without using any app, just part of the normal function starting with 3.0. 3.0 is still in the beta but being released soon, but as of a few days ago, emoji was still functioning on the beta as part of the normal operation of the iPhone, no app needed. And as of right now, there are still some apps in the store that enable emoji. I guess we'll see what happens, but I for one love the emoji and hope it stays!