EmotiPad II for Windows

EmotiPad II lets you easily dress up your e-mails and chats with emoticons, but it only worked with Outlook Express in our tests.

EmotiPad II's tabbed interface organizes its preloaded set of emoticons into categories, which are presented in a simple tree listing in the Manager tab. It can be hard to view all categories at once, however, because the program's window can't be resized. You can easily add or delete emoticons and categories, which makes it easy to manage your collection. We liked the ability to preview images in the Browser tab and the simple drag-and-drop method to insert an image. However, in our tests, EmotiPad II's emoticons could be seen only in Outlook Express e-mails and online forums. They failed to show up in Web-based e-mail programs like Yahoo Mail.

EmotiPad II includes a search tool to help you locate other emoticons. A short 14-day trial is offered. Despite its drawbacks, those who use the popular Microsoft Outlook e-mail program or who frequent online forums will appreciate the ease of managing and adding emoticons with EmotiPad II.