No emoji, no iPhone love ?

Following on the apparent sluggish sales, here’s one comment on the iPhone “demise”. The author points to the lack of emoji. I would also add another important factor, albeit to a lesser extent: a Yahoo! Keitai-type of web for the oh-so-many services not available for iPhone users.

Yes, emoji, and emoji alone. It’s missing a FeliCa RFID smart card, but most people use them embedded in credit cards, not phones; everyone talks about wanting One Seg but most people don’t actually watch television on their mobiles; there’s no QR code scanner but there’s a free App Store program to download for that; SD memory cards are popular add-ons, but the iPhone has lots of built-in storage; there’s no place to hang a strap, but an after-market slipcase can be decorated instead; there’s no emoji, yet having a lot of text emoticons and smilies in the dictionary does not paper over the chasm.

†┏┛墓┗┓† ←iPhone R.I.P. » 世論 What Japan Thinks.

It’s too soon to say if the iPhone is really a failure in Japan. The market for high-end handsets is shaking worldwide and the Japanese market will adapt in one way of another.

At the moment, it seems some people are buying the Apple phone while keeping their old handset at the same time. We’ll see if this pattern continues, especially with the possible introduction of emoji in the next firmware update.

Emoji coming with iPhone 2.2 firmware update?

According to MacRumors, the latest iPhone 2.2 firmware, just seeded to developpers, contains 461 emoji characters.

It is unclear if these will be made available on this firmware release or for a following one. It is also yet unknown if Softbank participated in the creation process, allowing the iPhone not only to send, but also receive emoji from other Japanese carriers on the i.softbank.jp e-mail address. 

Currently, sending emoji through the iPhone is only possible through a webapp.

Sending emoji through your iPhone

As reported many times, the lack of emojis is one reason for a kinda slow iPhone intrusion into the japanese market.

Someone clever created a little nifty gateway to allow for such a send on the japanese carrier networks.

Just point your iPhone to https://www.utilz.jp/x2/mail.jsp 

The trick -and a potentially dangerous one- ? You need a Gmail account and the site wants both your userID and password.

As it’s a send-only tool, this won’t resolve the fact that the iPhone is unable to receive such emoji, transcoding them instead into strange ASCII characters.

For those who don’t speak a word of Japanese, Jared on the iphoneinjapan.com forums offers this translation:

送信先メールアドレス recipient address
件名 subject
本文 body
クリックで編集 click to edit
アカウント account
パスワード password

Have tons of fun and comment if you decide to try it.

[Original source: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/ryoji02260209/56693673.html]

[UPDATE: possible introduction of official emoji with next firmware update: read more]