Emoji

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Emoji (絵文字, Emoji^?) is the Japanese name for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese 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, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au and SoftBank Mobile, have each 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 (non official private use) 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's emoji pictograms are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone) emojis are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences. The SoftBank design, which supports colors and animation, is particularly popular among young girls^{[citation needed]}. DoCoMo's emoji are the most compact to transmit while au's version is more flexible based on open standards.