15 cool emojis coming to a phone near you

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Emoji keyboards are changing fast — Apple last month introduced multi-racial emojis and the (somewhat hidden) Vulcan salute emoji. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: that “secret” Spock emoji isn’t an Apple creation, it’s part of a new batch of emojis released as part of the Unicode 7.0 update in 2014. Currently, iOS currently supports only one of the new symbols (the Vulcan salute), while Android and Windows Phone support none.

Both the same and different

Between smartphones, emojis are both wildly different and almost the same. Whether you use Android, iOS or Windows Phone 8.1, you’ll see a core set of emoji symbols on your keyboard. For example, everyone has the kissing and crying face emojis and the see/hear/speak-no-evil monkeys.

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The reason is that emoji symbols are actually coded into Unicode Standard. So, when you send an emoji from your iPhone to your friend’s Android handset, you’re sending not a picture but a code. The other phone translates that code into the corresponding emoji, which is why the kissing face on your iPhone doesn’t look the same as the one on your friend’s Android phone. In other words, it’s the same emoji, but rendered differently between phones.

Many more to come

With Unicode 7, that stable of emojis will grow far beyond the Vulcan salute. Unfortunately, though, mobile phone operating systems are still stuck in Unicode 6. That means for the moment at least, you’ll be missing out on a bunch of cool new emojis for almost any mood and situation. So, while we wait (iOS, Android and Windows Phone will get them eventually), here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming.

“Wind blowing face”

“Hot pepper”

“Heart with tip on the left”

“Bouquet of flowers”

“Level slider”

“Weight lifter”

“Building construction”

“Derelict house building”

“Chipmunk”

“Om symbol”

“Black skull and crossbones”

“No piracy”

“Hole”

“Man in business suit levitating”

“World map”

You can check out the rest of the Unicode 7.0 emojis here, but you’ll only see a bunch of squares if you don’t have a compatible font (such as Symbola) installed on your PC or Mac. And even then you won’t be able to see any of the new emojis on your mobile device, with the exception of the Vulcan salute emoji if you’re on iOS.

To install Symbola on your PC, download the ZIP file here and extract the contents. Open up the File Explorer and go to C:\Windows\Fonts. Copy the Symbola TrueType font file into this folder.

To install Symbola on your Mac, download the ZIP file to your desktop and double-click it to unzip it. Double-click the font file to open a preview of the font; at the bottom of the preview, click Install font.