Advancing technology is an interesting thing, which sometimes begets unusual outcomes. T9 predictive text was a huge leap forward on traditional flip phones, as it allowed you to type faster and almost always obtain the desired message. Occasionally I’d miss something as the phone was almost too smart, and a message would go out to a friend that didn’t quite make sense.
I recently ran into a similar and unexpected situation. Newer smart phones are coming out with built-in detection for emoticons – you know, those smiling yellow faces that can be found in most email strings, on Facebook, and many other online gathering places.
Take for example the following news alert, sent out by one of our clients:
NEWS TRAFFIC ALERT: Main St. (Hwy 78) in Blanchardville blocked after fire at tavern leaves four dead; more on WKOWTV.com
Several phones received the above message and replaced the “8)” with a smiley-face, creating a disturbing addition to an otherwise somber message. So we decided to test it out, and sent the following series of common characters to demote a smiley face to several phones to see what results we would get:
The results were extremely varied across various models of phones. As you can see from the pictorial evidence, some phones replaced all of the characters, some replace a few, and others saw it as only text.
Old Blackberry Vs. New Blackberry
iPhone Vs. Android
