Emoji

Public Service Announcement - Be careful who you send emoji characters to via text message - they may not be getting the output you expect! I was at a friend's house and she showed me her phone after getting a bunch of cryptic messages from an iOS user. I realized emoji doesn't necessarily render correctly on Android phones. Apparently KitKat fixes this to some success, however, she can't upgrade to that OS quite yet. Google Hangouts as her SMS application helped some but only to send. She still receives the malformed UTF-16 characters. ...

Have you enabled Emoji on your iPhone to use emoticon-like characters like 13 year-old Japanese girls? Well if you have, you've noticed that sending those characters in e-mail and IM to non-iPhone users ends up in little boxes of unreadable gibberish if you're lucky or whitespace. Most people understand the concept of Unicode if you're a geek. Someone like my mom doesn't always remember that Emoji being sent over IM, while she's on her own iPhone, isn't going to be readable when I'm on my Mac. ...