I'm not sure how we got from "WTFBBQ! Emoji will be the downfall of Apple!" to this though.
You've got it all wrong, boyo.
The introduction of the Pink MacBook Pro in 2009 will be Apple's downfall.
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iPhone 2.2 Includes Hidden Japanese Emoji Icons
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You've got it all wrong, boyo.
The introduction of the Pink MacBook Pro in 2009 will be Apple's downfall.
first of all, 2.1 fixes a lot of the problems you mentioned (safari, apps crashing and all that).
now about background push... i am HAPPY apple is taking there time. I don't care whether or not they met the deadline. They are making sure they're getting it right, unlike 2.0 which was rushed and messed up a LOT of phones (i lost all my notes, text messages... everything that doesn't sync to your comp). And look at their launch of mobileme as well, DISASTER.
so taking their time with push is a good thing. now if they're putting different teams to work on gaining market share in different markets, good for them. that just means we get more features.
The Japanese market says the iPhone doesn't sell that well because of the lack of stupid little cartoony characters? Give me a break. That's so retarded.
Another reason for Japanese people to buy American iPhones.
Not to mention the remaining fact that it's the best cell phone on the market. Period.
Not to mention the remaining fact that it's the best cell phone on the market. Period.
haha, i was thinking that the fact that apple failed in the Japanese market (one of the largest economies in the world) was retarded
Another reason for Japanese people to buy American iPhones.
Not to mention the remaining fact that it's the best cell phone on the market. Period.
Not according to the Japanese market im afraid..
Not according to the Japanese market im afraid..
Agreed, these posts from Americans who have never been to Japan claiming that emoji are retarded and an American phone is the best in the world are so stereotypical it hurts. Wake up, sell your rifle, and get a passport already.
Have you lived in Japan? (Sorry if you have.) These are important in the Japanese market, where the sort of thing that sells phones is:
They look cute.
They have cute emoji.
Colo(u)rs.
Japanese people couldn't give a **** about cut and paste, push e-mail(other than the standard keitai(mobile) e-mail they use) etc to be honest.
As a generalisation of course, not all Japanese are like that just the main market.
OK, to beat a long-deceased horse:
Obviously, Apple is NOT diverting any significant part of their dev. staff to this. I'm just as eager as everyone else to have some clearly needed basic functions (copy, cut/paste) on my iPhone, but I'll be pretty damned psyched to have emoji functionality (though not nearly so much as my GF, who has been virtually heartbroken -- pardon the pun -- that we can't put little hearts, flowers, & cetera in our keitai mail). If you don't live or haven't lived in Japan, you probably can't quite appreciate how much of a liability not having emoji is, and how this little fix is likely to substantially increase the market share. Whether it was Apple or SoftBank who actually engineered it, it desperately needed to be done.
The "push" issue is more or less a non-issue here, since most Japanese use their cell-phone provider address as their primary email, and don't bother with regular email, or use it only very secondarily. In a sense, it's all "pushed" already, like SMS or MMS. Email arrives, your phone rings.
@sonex:
I'll try to abstain from flaming.
"cutesiness" is of course an element, but there are also issues about linguistic differences, and the difficulty of conveying light-hearted nuance in short text messages (Chilz0r is joking, but closer to the truth than he/she may realize). Effeminate tendencies in Japanese men and racial peculiarities of anime and manga ("those anime magazines") granted, but relevance to the discussion at hand extremely dubious.
As a matter of fact, I'm living in Japan right now. I also show off my iPod touch (1G) to Japanese students around here, and they love what these things can do. I show them how the keyboard works, (english, japanese qwerty, and a chinese kanji manual entry that doesn't always work since Chinese =/= Japanese) show them music, the video section, how photos look, I show them a few games, then give off a laundry list of things I could do if there was wifi in the area. (because, of course, being in the most technologically advanced country in the world means I've found exactly zero wifi connections, including in several Starbucks...)
I've also talked to a couple Japanese students in the area who have iPhones and asked them why they got one. The answer was the same: it was just something different. They both gave the same two complaints about the phone:
- It doesn't play TV. (many phones here can receive broadcast tv)
- It doesn't have emoticons. (emoji)
I have a keitai (cell phone) here personally, and I rarely use it for calls; most of the time, it's for nothing other than text messaging and random internet use. It's pretty much the same for a good portion of the people I know, and it's just what is the thing to do around here. People all have very similar-looking cell phones as well. (with dangling trinkets, including a Nara Park deer from mine)
I guess my point in all this is that adding something silly like emoji seems like a smart move, since:
- It removes an actual complaint about the phone from the Japanese market.
- It adds another keyboard (I'm assuming you just add it as a keyboard at this point)
- It's probably a very low-maintenance addition. (I'd see no more than 30 man-hours on this, combining programming, icon design, and testing among 2-3 people combined, at most)
In Japan they are important. That is not one added feature. It is one less feature that the phone lacks, since pretty much all your (JP) friends' have it, and they will be sending you (and they indeed do) messages with those in, that so far you cannot read. Without those, it is Vodafone all over again: people laugh at your ass for having such a crappy phone that doesn't work with what is standard for all the rest, and you want to switch because it makes you so frigging uncool. And once you've switched, boy, do you talk about your experience… And then not even the best PR can fix the damage done to the brand's image.
Agreed on nobody JP really caring for QRCodes and 1Seg TV, on the iPhone or on any other phone. But you forgot another pressing issue: the iPhone's JP input method should be faster than a human's finger (just as any other JP phone) no matter the app. Currently it is not, and typing on it is rather often a frustrating experience.
About Emoji
Hello
Emoji's design is not the work of Apple, SoftBank Japan has officially adopted the pictogram design.
Emoji is embedded in the font.
And the image is displayed on top of an empty glyphs.
http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/service/3G/mail/pictogram/list.html
Hello
Emoji's design is not the work of Apple, SoftBank Japan has officially adopted the pictogram design.
Emoji is embedded in the font.
And the image is displayed on top of an empty glyphs.
http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/service/3G/mail/pictogram/list.html
Yeh, forget about all those people not in the Asian market that have been customers for past 2 years. Asking for something as basic as copy and paste, how dare they. Emojicons definitely should have priority.
No, I'm not a programmer and neither are 99.9% of the users. I bought the iPhone 2G & then 3G with expectations that relevant useful applications would be built.
It's become a phone for gamers and toys. It is not by any means close to a Business phone that Apple claims it to be now.
The damn email doesn't even have spell check and lacks the most fundamental features of a dumb phone.
Actions like this are a large reason the stock is near a 52 week low.
Enjoy your cute little icons and watch the competition pass Apple.
52 week stock low 94.65 Friday's close $97.07. Maybe the Japanese market sales are bad because they are used to a more sophisticated smart phone market than we in the US are.
Emoji is a quick-win low hanging fruit for a picky market with over 100 million mobile phone users. Moves like this are a necessary part of *not* being surpassed by the competition. Apple is ahead in some ways, but playing catch up in most. Don't begrudge them that some of the catchup steps along the way are unglamorous.
Consider how far the software has come from 1.0 15 months ago, back when Steve said there'd be no SDK or third-party apps, there was no push e-mail/contacts/calendar or Exchange support, you couldn't have multiple calendars or color coding, there was no WPA2-Enterprise support, most non-English languages weren't supported, there was no iTunes WiFi music store, there was no location awareness...you couldn't even send SMS to multiple recipients...need I go on? Software development is a time-consuming and iterative process. Other competitors have been around for years. Apple is doing its best to introduce innovative features while also filling in the many gaps of lacking "dumb phone" features because this is a totally new platform built from scratch. If it doesn't meet your needs right now, go buy a phone that does and wait for a future iPhone that does meet your needs, rather than expecting that a phone you bought that didn't have the features you wanted was magically going to get everything you needed in the next software update.
I very much doubt that they've "put off" copy/paste, or push notifications for this. Apple will almost certainly have different teams working on different things, some will focus on communications (push), while there may be multiple teams for user-interface such as a functionality team (copy/paste) and a localisation team (emojiis).
They must have an elite crack team working for the past 2 years then. Copy and paste, SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Actually, there are several apps on in the iTunes store that support QR Code reading. The only problem is that they're limited to larger QR Codes. This is a hardware limitation since the iPhone camera doesn't support macro focus.
It's one reason and it bums a lot of people out. Japanese people just like cute little things.
Emoji is really important for the market. I'm American, living in Japan, and my switch to iPhone has me missing emoji too.
A code is sent within the email, and each handset provides its own picture for each code. The meaning is maintained, while the pictures may be slightly different. So this won't be useful for any other countries, BUT!
According to the screenshot, emoji was implemented as an add-on keyboard. This didn't take excessive resources. Just someone working out the graphics set, and then choosing how to display them. And of course, substituting the pictures within the emails.
This is important for the Japanese market, no doubt, and I'm happy Apple is getting it done.
But I'm also disappointed with glaring omissions of features in the iPhone software. Some, besides cut and paste of course, are just obvious and as a developer, I'm shocked they haven't put them in...
A code is sent within the email, and each handset provides its own picture for each code. The meaning is maintained, while the pictures may be slightly different. So this won't be useful for any other countries, BUT!
According to the screenshot, emoji was implemented as an add-on keyboard. This didn't take excessive resources. Just someone working out the graphics set, and then choosing how to display them. And of course, substituting the pictures within the emails.
This is important for the Japanese market, no doubt, and I'm happy Apple is getting it done.
But I'm also disappointed with glaring omissions of features in the iPhone software. Some, besides cut and paste of course, are just obvious and as a developer, I'm shocked they haven't put them in...
You're absolutely right. Lots of people in the US/UK have purchased iPhones in the past year, knowing that they didn't support copy/paste. However many people here in Japan are unwilling to purchase the iPhone in the first place without emoji support. So, yeah - I'd say adding emoji should be a top priority for Apple, assuming they hope to sell more than ten iPhones here in Japan.
Someone said those emoji are from another source than Apple, but the link that person provided showed all the major versions and the iPhone screenshot shows completely unique versions from that page.
Anyone care to clarify?
(btw, very nice point, Mavis)
Anyone care to clarify?
(btw, very nice point, Mavis)
Why do people come in here and complain if they're not even interested in this feature? I could start rambling about the iPhone's atrocious German spell checking now, but I won't. I think these icons are useful for people who want them and I hope that they will help Apple in the Japanese market.