This article was published on April 13, 2011

Use Emoji to Spice Up Your Emails on iPhone and iPad


Use Emoji to Spice Up Your Emails on iPhone and iPad

Emoji are sets of Japanese pictograms that seem to cover the entire range of human expression.

They’ve got symbols for everything from suicide to kittens and enabling them on your iDevices even if you’re not in Japan has become a fairly easy affair. Recently I got a message that used Emoji in the subject line and I thought, hey, this would be great in the subject line of an Email

So you’re sitting there reading your email on your iPhone or iPad, scroll, scroll, scroll. Boring text is whizzing by when boom, out of nowhere it’s a brilliant little icon with two beer glasses clinking together!

You stop and tap on the email, because, cmon, you have to. It says “Drinks after work? -Mike.”

It’s such a cool way to make your email stand out from the boring sea of black text that we wade through in our inboxes every day. I don’t think that it’s appropriate for a business email obviously, but between friends it could be a slick way to tell them that hey, it’s you and you’ve got something to say with pictures.

If this sounds like just the sort of thing that you need to make your email subject lines more interesting then here’s how to do it.

Enable Emoji on your iDevices

Any iPhone, iPad or iPod touch can display Emojii properly, right out of the box with no need to enable them. In order to use Emoji you’ll have to enable the icon sets first. Here is the easiest way that I’ve found. Note that this absolutely does not require Jailbreaking your device.

1. Download this free app from the App Store.

2. Launch the app and tap “ok, let’s do this”.

3. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboard > Add New Keyboard > Emoji.

4. Reboot your iPhone.

Type Emoji in an email

In order to use Emoji, you’ll need to access the Emoji keyboard while you’re typing. To test this out, start a new email to reveal your keyboard. Then tap on the small globe in the bottom corner. This will reveal your Emoji keyboard that you can use to type symbols. Explore all of the sections as there are tons of icons to choose from, remember that each section has multiple pages!

That’s it, now you’re free to use Emoji in your email and beyond on your iPhone or iPad. Just to wrap it up I will let you know that there are a couple of conditions. As mentioned above, any iDevice can display Emoji but you’re not so lucky on a computer. If you’re reading an email with Emojii in it on a desktop or laptop  then you’ll just get gibberish instead of icons.

Also Japanese users will most likely already have Emoji enabled so the above activation procedures are unnecessary. Check out the graphic below to see all of the different Emoji available!

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