Thank, God.

It's about time.

歓迎、弟

(Emoji reference: https://gist.github.com/1707371

"Many many years ago a Japanese cell phone carrier called SoftBank came =

up with the idea for emoji and built it into the cell phones that it =

sold for their network. The problem they had was in deciding how to =

represent the characters in electronic form. They decided to use =

Unicode code points in the private use areas. This is a perfectly valid =

thing to do as long as your data stays completely within your product. =

However, with text messages the data has to interoperate with other =

carriers' phones.

Unfortunately SoftBank decided to copyright their entire set of images, =

their encoding, etc etc etc and refused to license them to anyone. So, =

when NTT and KDDI (two other Japanese carriers) decided that they wanted =

emoji they had to do their own implementations. To make things even =

more sad they decided not to work with each other and gang up on =

SoftBank. So, in Japan, there were three competing emoji standards that =

did not interoperate."

What does this mean in practice?

As an unhappy Sprint customer will I be happy in the next year, or will I have to move to Verizon and wait for them to make Sprint better?