Turning Japanese: iPhone Hack Has Emoji Working Overtime

Emoji.  They're the bastard offspring of Pokemon and Hello Kitty: graphic emoticons that are all the rage amongst the Land of the Rising Sun's tween population.  And for the longest time -- possibly for good reason -- Japanese iPhones didn't offer Emoji support.  Well, that's not entirely true: it was included in the iPhone 2.2 firmware on the SoftBank network, but not for anyone else.

Turns out a simple patching process will give you access to something on the order of a gazillion Emoji emoticons:

You need to edit the file /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist on the device -> whether you use a jailbreak to achieve this or merely some iTunes backup editor is up to you.

Add the following boolean key as ‘true’: KeyboardEmojiEverywhere

Then merely go to the Keyboards section of the Settings app, hit Japanese, and turn on Emoji. Will work for any text field/view in the OS, including on websites, AND including the titles of items on SpringBoard (e.g. if you save a bookmark to the home screen).

The easiest way to do with will probably be to run your iPhone as an SFTP server, which is as easy as installing a package or two on your jailbroken phone.