It’s actually super easy to activate emoticons or emoji’s or smileys or whatever you’ll like to call them on an iPhone or iPad. It seems that Apple have set up a native “International Keyboard” dedicated to emoticons which houses a pretty extensive set of emoticons.

Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards

Click on “Add New Keyboard…” and select “Emoji”

Your QWERTY keyboard will now have an additional button next to the space bar as shown here:

If you click on it once, and your keyboard will switch over to the Emoji list or you can click and hold it to allow for a full list of the active keyboards to be displayed.

The list of emoticons are very comprehensive, but the tab with the clock, shows your last used set of emoticons, which is quite a handy feature if you tend to use the same set repetitively.