I love emoticons and emoji and use them all the time. I was thrilled to read that Apple’s latest iOS and Mac OS X updates now include various racial and ethnic variations on common emoji. Finally. But, how do I use them on my old iPhone 5, or am I shut out?
The good news is that if you can update your Apple iPhone 5 to iOS 8.3 or latest, you’re good to go, you just need to learn how to turn on the emoji keyboard and select the desired skin tones for your emoticon. If you’re trapped on an older iPhone and can’t update to iOS 8.3 – or even iOS 8 – then I think you’re stuck, which is a definite drag.
On your Mac it’s the same thing: Mac OS X 10.10.3 is the version that’s added the snazzy new emoji but if you don’t update to that version, well, then you ain’t going to be able to select them or see ’em properly rendered on screen. And, worth noting, if you send these to someone who has a non-iPhone or non-Mac system, the results might be an empty square instead of the cheery little picture.
In other words, you might send something like this:
but the other party could still theoretically end up looking at this:
Still, if they do have an up-to-date iPhone or Mac system, it will all work just fine, so let’s have a look at the process!
To start, here’s an easy place to see if you already have the emoji keyboard enabled: Notes. When I’m poised to enter the text of a note, here’s what I might see:
If you look on the lower left, there’s a missing globe button and smiley button that let you easily access alternative keyboards.
Let’s fix that!
Go to “Settings” > “General” and look for the “Keyboard” entry:
It’s about 2/3 of the way down on my screen capture.
Tap on Keyboard.
Now you want to look at Keyboards. Notice I have 1 enabled, as indicated.
To enable additional keyboards, tap on Keyboards. Logical enough!
You’ll need to swipe down a ways to find “Emoji”, but they’re alphabetical so I bet you can do it.
Eventually, you’ll see:
Tap on the language or languages you might want to access (I’m also going to add Spanish since I type in a number of Spanish words and having access to the Spanish character set is useful) and make sure to also choose Emoji too.
That’s it. Done.
Now, back in the Notes app, the keyboard layout is a bit different:
The globe icon on the very lower left makes it easy to access other language keyboards, while the smiley face icon near it is how you get to the emoji keyboard.
I’ll tap on the globe and now…
I should note that if you’re using a foreign language keyboard then autocorrect is tied to that language too, which means it’s crazy-making to try and type in English while you have the Spanish keyboard up.
Instead, let’s do that Emoji thing and tap on the smiley face button instead.
Now a super fun display of emoji shows up:
Almost there! See all those grey images along the bottom? Those are categories of emoji. There are a LOT of emoji, needless to say.
Only a small number of emoji seem to be multi-ethnic aware so for many of them, this technique won’t work, but tap and hold your finger over an emoji that’s a person’s face and see what happens. With the Santa emoji, for example, turns out the old guy can have a variety of skin tones:
Now choose the Santa you like best and tap again, and you’ve just added a non-caucasian Santa to your note or sent a non-white Santa emoji to a friend. Hopefully.