I recently came across a way to enable the Japanese emoji characters on a 3.0 iPhone for free, and all without jailbreaking. It seems there is an app, called Spell Number, that has a hidden feature that when you type a specific number into it, enables the emoji keyboard option in the iPhone’s settings, and all one has to do is simply toggle it to “On” and that’s it – instant emoji! No hacks, no cracks, and no jailbreaking. To enable emoji on your iPhone with OS 3.0, follow these steps.
1) First, open the App Store and download the free app titled “Spell Number” (iTunes link)
2) Once the app is installed, launch the app, and enter the number “91929394.59”. No need to press any button after the last digit is entered. Simply enter the number and then exit the app back out to the home screen.
3) Now launch the Settings app, and navigate to General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese, and then simply flip the toggle switch to enable emoji.
Once emoji is enabled, you will see the International Keyboard key (the little world looking symbol, next to the 123 numeric keyboard button) on the virtual keyboard when in an app that supports it. There are six categories of emoji, each with several pages of fun symbols and pictures (swipe left or right to move through the pages).
Keep in mind however, that even though the Mail app and other IM and messaging apps may allow you to insert emoji into a message, the recipient’s device must also support emoji for the special characters to display. From my testing, various desktop email apps handle the emoji characters differently, displaying bullets in Microsoft Outlook or gibberish characters in Gmail. If the recipient is also using an iPhone running OS 2.2 or higher including OS 3.0, then they should be able to see the emoji characters just fine.
Enjoy adding these fun symbols and pictures to your messages! 🙂
Update: One of our readers, Wayne, has discovered that the emoji remains enabled even if you remove the Spell Number app. Thanks Wayne, for this tip!
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TAGS: iphone 3.0
