[clonmult]

I've got one main wind up on S60.

A total lack of EMS support, or specifically the displaying of emoticons (smilies) on text messages.

It does seem ever so slightly bizarre that a smartphone doesn't have a facility that is supported on S40.

[petrib]

EMS has nothing to do with emoticons/smileys. EMS is an Ericsson SMS extension that Nokia has never really supported. Nokia implemented its own Smart Messaging specification, instead, and that one has adopted by virtually every phone manufacturer on the planet. EMS is primarily only a Sony Ericsson thing, and something of a mix of the Nokia Smart Messaging and MMS (almost all phone manufacturers and network operators also support MMS).

Emoticons are never transmitted as actual graphics, but text symbols ':' followed by ')' or '-' and then ')' are displayed as a smiley on the device.

Even on a phone that doesn't support the symbols, you can type the characters and on a receiving phone that does, they'll be shown.

It is true that many of the newer S40 phones do support them, but S60 never has. Not sure if the next version of S60 will; no actual devices based on it - S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 - have been announced yet.

[clonmult]

My mistake on the nature of EMS.

I know I can type in the characters, or multiple presses of 1 with t9 enabled gives you the various :-) :-( ;-)

But unless they're rendered as the intended image, some can be a tad difficult to understand. I do definitely miss the animations that I had on my W550 (and W810, which is currently in use by the gf).

Regardless though, it does seem like a curious omission.

[petrib]

One of the thousands of possible nice-to-have features (for some). With limited development time, budgets and developers, all the possible features one could want do not get done (sometimes never, sometimes it takes time).