Emoji has been popular on phones, especially in Japan, as they are basically what we call “emoticons”. Emoticons are an easy way to express emotions as a facial expression. However, this has not been easy on the iPhone. In order to enable emoji, you had to install an app called “Emoji Icons Free”, by Surpax Technology Inc, and had to fiddle with it for 10 minutes as you had to go back the app itself, and also fiddle with the Settings app in order to enable it.

However, many people do not know that Emoji is actually built-in to iOS 4. Even though it doesn’t look like the emoticons we are used to seeing, it is unique. In order to enable this, you have to enable the Japanese keyboard by going into Settings-> General-> Keyboard-> International Keyboards-> and enable the Japanese Romaji keyboard. Once enabled, you can go into any app, tap on the international globe icon (to change language), tap on the shift key for symbols, and on the far bottom right is a smiley emoji. Once you tap on that, you get hundreds of emojis that you can use to have fun with your friends.

For those who cannot be bothered to install the app, or to enable Japanese just for emoji, you don’t have to worry. Apple is enabling emoji as a default feature in all keyboards in iOS 5, or at least in Beta 1 of it. The images below show you how you can enable it, and how it is usable to make custom Folder names.

About the Author: Kenta Arai is a tech enthusiast who was born in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan. His passion towards technology began to develop as he grew up in Hong Kong, where technology had its solid place in the mass market. Arai became one of the most enthusiastic technophile student in his high-school, and was also well-known for consulting many of his school-mates when purchasing new computers. His expertise in the tech industry is focused on Apple Inc. and Google Inc.