Encoding of Emoji in SMS, and UCS-2 vs UTF-16

The SMS standard specifies UCS-2 encoding:
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/23038.htm

I see many “emoji” have been defined in Unicode 6. But many emoji are outside the BMP, so can’t be encoded in UCS-2. Does anyone know, is the intention that these emoji should be encoded in SMS using UTF-16 rather than UCS-2? Are there any plans in-progress to update the SMS standards to specify UTF-16 rather than UCS-2?

Perhaps this question could be added to the Emoji FAQ. http://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html

Regards,
Craig McQueen

Received on Tue Aug 16 2011 - 12:26:16 CDT