While Emoji is enabled for our friends in Japan, the United States never received the same love and attention, and at times, had hissy fits over Emoji keyboards available in the App Store. So while iOS 4 does and doesn’t have emoji available to customers, Apple is intending on updating the little emoticons to be used with applications like FaceTime and Google Maps. At least I think so according to Patently Apple’s latest finding, which shows Apple taking a deep interest in making stock and custom emoji prevalent in certain applications.

Patently Apple writes,

“A recently published patent application of Apple’s reveals that iOS will at some point gain new widget creating modules specifically relating to stock and/or custom Emoji Characters. The architecture reveals that modules will appear around the time that videoconferencing comes to the iPhone. With Apple having just revealed FaceTime, the new emoji character modules should be on their way in the next year or so if all goes well.”

Apple is looking into how to better display emoji on the iPhone’s small screen - making the selection fast and efficient is necessary. Other parts of the patent include using an emoji avatar to display user location on a map. Personally I’m not a fan of the cutsie yellow headed fellas that tend to pop up in our favorite instant messaging applications, but I still don’t mind some simple ASCII-cons to do my bidding. ^.^

The patent is fascinating (partly because it’s so weird), and you can check out more at Patently Apple.