Emoji
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Emoji (絵文字) is the Japanese name for the picture characters or emoticons for use in wireless messages and webpages. The name literally means picture (絵 e) character (文字 moji). The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided. All the Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au/KDDI and Vodafone Japan, have defined their own variants of emoji.
For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji symbol is drawn on a 12x12 pixel grid. When transmitted, emoji symbols are specified as a two-byte sequence, in the range E63E through E757 in the Unicode character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift-JIS. The basic specification has 176 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0.
au/KDDI's emoji pictograms are specified using the IMG tag. Vodafone Japan's emoji's are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences. The Vodafone design, which supports colors and animation, is particularly popular among young girls. DoCoMo emoji's are the most compact to transmit while au/KDDI's version is more flexible based on open standards.
External links
- NTT DoCoMo: Emoji (http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/mc-user/i/tag/emoji/), Basic Set (http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/tag/emoji/) (authoritative reference, in Japanese)
- au/KDDI: Emoji (http://www.au.kddi.com/ezfactory/tec/spec/3.html), Type 1 (http://www.au.kddi.com/ezfactory/tec/spec/icon_mono.html) 2 (http://www.au.kddi.com/ezfactory/tec/spec/icon_color.html) (in Japanese)
- Vodafone Japan: Emoji (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_top.php), Page 1 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_01.php) 2 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_02.php) 3 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_03.php) 4 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_04.php) 5 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_05.php) 6 (http://www.dp.j-phone.com/dp/tool_dl/web/picword_06.php) (beautifully designed, in Japanese)