smiley

Twikao turns your smiling mug into (^_^)

How you feeling today? (^_^)/ or (T_T)? Perhaps somewhat (=_=)?

If the above leaves you a tad (?_?), you're not up on your Japanese emoticons. But you can soon get up to snuff with Twikao, an app that automatically converts your mugshot into expressive symbols.

Japanese kaomoji (literally, "face letters") differ from Western smileys in several ways. For one, they're read vertically instead of horizontally, so that the brackets in the kaomoji above represent the sides of a face, and the symbols within are eyes and a mouth. For instance, a "T" is a watering eye, and (T_T) is crying.

Another feature of kaomoji is their wild expressiveness. The vertical form lends itself to a myriad of cartoonish little faces and combinations like \(^_^)/, a kind of mini-ode to joy. … Read more

Finding more smileys on your Android keyboard

Attaching smileys to instant messages, texts, and e-mail can be a fun and easy way to add character to your messages. Whether you're trying to convey extreme joy :D or sorrow :'(, there are some extra smileys built into your Android phone's keyboard that you may not know about. However, finding them is just a couple of finger presses away.

Step 1: Open the app you want to send a message from.

Step 2: Tap the screen where you want to start typing so the keyboard will pop up.

Step 3: Press and hold on the happy smiley face … Read more

Cell phones with absurd names

Though Samsung's :)--that's Smiley for the uninitiated--has us all riled up, it's hardly the the first cell phone to bear a rather silly or baffling name. True, Samsung, tends to be the worst offender in this area, but other manufacturers have left us just as perplexed. That's why we took this opportunity to take a trip down memory lane for the most ridiculous cell phone names that we've seen. It wasn't easy to choose just 10, but here are our picks for the most bizarre cell phones. And be sure to tell us which … Read more

Samsung announces Gravity 3, Gravity T, and :)

We've always thought there must be people at Samsung who randomly pick a word from the dictionary to name the company's phones. Now we think they must have run out of words.

That's because one of the latest Samsung phones for T-Mobile, announced Wednesday, is called--we kid you not--the Samsung :). Thankfully, Samsung "Smiley" is an acceptable substitute, because otherwise we would have a hard time trying to order the darn thing over the phone ("You know...The Samsung colon with the right bracket?"). What's next, the Samsung :-p ?

The Smiley is, as … Read more

Intuitive e-mail enhancer

PostSmile is a silly but fun program that allows users to insert emoticons, quotes, and signatures into their e-mail. The program's content is kind of ridiculous, but we really like the way it works.

The program's interface is kind of ingenious. The content--including animated smiley faces, quotes, jokes, and more--is arranged in tabs. Inserting everything into e-mail is a simple matter of dragging and dropping things into the body of the message. Using the program was simple and fun. Whether you'd actually want to use the program's content is another matter entirely. There are five tabs … Read more