"You can now smile", says WhatsApp

You can now smile on WhatsApp!

It is to my total delight and probably that of thousands of other users that WhatsApp's suite of fascinating emoji now includes a regular smiley. Year after year, we were forced to resort to using a typographic emoticon ":-)" whenever we wanted to express subtle delight in a chat. Cos' the simplest icons available on WhatsApp for expressing delight were these:

Exaggerated WhatsApp smiley emojis

Either you close your eyes, show off your teeth or you open your mouth wide. Crazy innit. I suspect the designers' conception of delight to be so out of this world. Tell me about it.

One would wonder what triggered the release of the smiley emoji after so many years. Not like it would have been any complicated task to have done it in previous years or even at the start, considering the quality of the product's development/design team. Did enough people not complain, or was it a philosophy or something of that sort? I wonder, but my wonder is not compelling enough to push me into going out there to search for deeper knowledge. So, I'll just remain in my state of wonder till a truck comes by to snap me out of it.

I particularly like the twist introduced by the upside down smiley emoji (pictured above). I really don't get what one would be trying to portray by smiling upside down instead of otherwise. Though, that does not stop me from using it when my instincts tell me that using this would be more accurate and exciting than using a face-up smiley. Don't ask me, it's pure instinct and I can't explain the difference or why I use one over the other in any logical way.

to smiling...