Japan telecom giant NTT Docomo to end own emoji after 26 yrs
The carrier's Android smartphones and feature phones marketed from June will not come with the Docomo emoji set. Announcing the decision in late May, the firm said they had "fulfilled their role" while noting that Google's emoji had become more common globally.
The new mobile phones will adopt Noto Color Emoji by Google or Samsung emoji instead, it said.
The Docomo emoji were introduced in 1999 with the company's i-mode service, an Internet-capable mobile phone system that the company also plans to terminate, in 2026.
Emoji became massively popular in Japan as an element of texting, especially among teenagers in the 2000s, with some creating emoji-only messages, before taking root globally.
In 2016, NTT Docomo's set of 176 emoji was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum stating, "Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication."
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