How to add emoticons (or emoji) to your iPhone or iPad

I couldn’t work out how to add emoticons to my messages in Whatsapp. My non-iPhone friends seem to be able to do it and I just couldn’t work it out. This morning Nastassja came into my office and showed me how to do it (boy I felt like a bit of an old fart needing to have a younger person show me how to do this). It’s actually really easy when you see how. I thought I’d prepare a quick “how to” post. I took the screenshots off my iPad but you can follow the same process on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Step 1:

Open your Settings panel and select the General tab. Look for the International menu item and tap that.

Step 2:

In the International window, select the Keyboards option to view your current keyboards.

Select the option to add a new keyboard.

Look for the Emoji option. Tap on that to select it. This will add a new keyboard to your options whenever the device keyboard pops up (usually for text fields).

Step 3:

You can select the keyboard you want to use by tapping on the globe button.

When you want to insert an emoticon into your message (or any text field you are typing into), tap the globe button till you get to the Emoji keyboard and select the emoticon you want to use and it will be inserted where your cursor is. It’s basically a keyboard so when you tap on emoticons, you are basically typing using them as letters.

Step 4:

Express yourself is all sorts of ways. See if you can use all the emoji in one message that actually makes sense!