[batista]

>It's a shame on OSX/iOS. When I've used these characters and viewed on Safari it turns them into raster icons ... exactly what I don't want. Windows and Linux are fine.

Your comment does not make sense.

1) When "you've used these characters" where? On a webpage?

2) They ARE raster icons. What did you expect them to be? Fonts don't have multiple colors.

3) How does "Windows and Linux" handle them better? Most apps there don't handle them AT ALL.

[mkl]

You seem to be mistaken. Some operating systems display them as colour images, but that is not essential at all. They are mapped to Unicode characters, and so when displayed as characters, as in normal applications with an appropriate font, they are vector-based and monochrome. See e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

[batista]

Yes, but the full on experience is the translation to full color images.

That's how the Japanese use them in their mobiles, no?

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Yep.

[cutie]

These are unicode codepoints and handled just fine everywhere but on Apple gear, and (I think IE6/XP). If you've never seen them it means you are on Apple or never bothered to install the fonts.