Cool symbols (emoticons) for your iPhone & iPad

vickeryhill3rd Party Integrations, Web Design, Web Marketing

Friends, clients and family members have been asking more and more lately: “hey, how did you get that cool icon of a beer mug, rocket, heart, horse, etc when you texted me?”

I think it was a friend who developed the Symbolicons set that first told me about it, but i guess people still haven’t been shown how to add these neat, sometimes productive, icons to your iPhone/iPad’s keyboard capabilities. I will detail the steps below using my iPhone 4S with iOS6 beta software.

What are they

Back in 2007 some folks at Google & Apple requested inclusion of a picture characters or symbols to the Unicode Standard. These Emoji characters are now included on Apple’s iOS and Windows Phone 7. On Apple’s iPhone & iPad, you simply have to add a 2nd keyboard in your settings to enjoy the latest emoticons in messages, mail, etc.

How to get the emoticons to show up on your iOS keyboard

Well it’s as simple as clicking into your settings and adding a second keyboard, now standard in Apple’s iOS, called Emoji.

First, click into SETTINGS on your iPhone, iPod or iPad > Scroll down & tap the GENERAL button

 
Now scroll to and tap the INTERNATIONAL button, then tap the KEYBOARDS button
 
Depending on what language you set your iPhone or other iOS device up as, you should now see a single keyboard (‘English’ in my example)
Simply tap the ADD NEW KEYBOARD button and then scroll down and select EMOJI
 
You should now see two keyboards. That’s it. You’re done.
Now go to any application that uses the keyboard (try texting your friend some cool emoticons).
Once in the keyboard, you can see the International keyboard symbol. Tap it to see the various sets of emoticons available in the Emoji keyboard
  
At the bottom of the Emoji keyboard, you will see 8 buttons on the bottom to help you navigate
From Left to Right, they are: RETURN to Keyboard | Recently Used | Faces | Flowers & Animals | Objects | Transportaton | Other Symbols | Backspace (Delete)
The RETURN globe will take you back to your standard keyboard.
The RECENTLY USED will display your latest 21 emoticons used.
The next 5 buttons are the Emoticons. Once clicked, you can swipe left and right to see the multiple pages of symbols on each one.
I hope this helped. Enjoy the new picture characters available on your keyboard. There are even more cool emoticons included in the soon-to-be-released Apple iOS6 this fall.