Emoji emoticons on any iPhone :)
The iPhone has support for popular Japanese emoticons known as emoji — but only if you’re in Japan. Us Americans (and other iPhone customers across the world) have been stuck with the bland old “:)” — text-based emoticons — until now. A small hack will allow any iPhone owner to use emoji icons without jailbreaking the phone.
The hack, first published by the Japanese site iPodTouchLab and translated by the site WinandMac, works as follows:
Step 1. Download the vcard.vcf here.
Step 2. Import it to your address book program. If you are using Windows, you may want to do it on iPhone directly. Send the vcard.vcf file to yourself. Open in on iPhone’s Email.app, click the vcf file and import all the contacts.
Step 3. Go into “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard” > “Japanese Keyboard”. Enable the QWERTY keyboard.
Step 4. In notes or any other program you want. Type “emojia”, “emojii” or “emojiu” to select those
icons.
Step 5. Happy Emoji!
This hack brings a 
to my face, since previously, as Apple noted:
Not all customers can create and view Emoji picture characters. Emoji picture characters can only be sent from an iPhone running OS 2.2 with a SoftBank email account and a SoftBank SIM.
But, if you don’t want to go through that process, you can also download the $5 Touch Dial Emoji app [iTunes Link] in the App Store, or just jailbreak your iPhone, as Gizmodo notes.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.