Ever type a text message and feel you weren’t accurately expressing your feelings about an airplane? How about a men’s room sign? The iEmoji application for the iPhone solves those problems for you — by giving you a couple hundred icons for use in notes and text messages so diverse that you’ll likely never use most of them.
The 99-cent app adds a virtual keyboard to your iPhone that provides an overwhelming selection of emoticons. They can range from all manner of smiley faces to express your feelings, to modes of transportation such as cars and trains. There also are completely random icons, including stylized Japanese characters.
For less than a buck, this popular app is not that bad of a deal. If only it were more functional.
For starters, iEmohi is practically useless for iPod Touch owners. iPhone users can do more, but the sender and receiver of any text message has to have iEmoji installed in order to exchange an emoticon. That’s not very compatible. Further, the emoticons show up in emails as blank squares.
While iEmoji does provide a great number of icons — some of which actually are pretty cool — they are not useful if they don’t work or never reach a recipient. It is better to save your dollar for something others can actually see.
