Yonhap reports that with the lifting of regulations requiring domestically sold cell phones carry the WIPI platform from April next year, the local mobile phone industry is expecting a flood of foreign-mad phones and mobile devices, including BlackBerries and iPhones, and local telecom providers are making their moves. SK Telecom has been the most aggressive in terms of deals with overseas makers, but LG and KTF are swinging into action.
Korean manufacturers currently account for 95% of domestic cell phone sales.
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
2009 is going to be a watershed year in terms of Telecoms in Korea.
Now if only we could get rid of Internet Explorer and put important documents in .pdf rather than .hwp I’d be a happy man.
(Also no more Die! You Son of a Bitch! Die! When it comes to WIPI :’-( )
This reckless endangerment of the Korean people is an utter travesty. American-made cell phones cause brain tumors! This is a documented fact, and the American industry has done nothing to stop it. Furthermore, the cell phones they will export to Korea carry an even greater risk than their usual cell phones. Also, because of their genetic make-up, Koreans are more susceptible to brain tumors. It is irresponsible of the Korean government to allow these cell phones into the country, where they will surely be labeled as Korean phones. Won’t someone please think of the children!
Quoted from the Internet (www.dotwhat?!.com)
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Hangul (aka Hangul Word Processor or HWP) is a word processing application from Haansoft, and is very popular in South Korea, mainly due to the way it has been designed for the Korean written language.
Text documents created in Hangul are saved with the extension HWP. Any HWP files created with Hangul ’97 or before can be opened with OpenOffice. However, .HWP files created after this version are not compatible due to the changes in the file format’s structure.
Most recent versions of Hangul are able to save documents in Microsoft’s .DOC format.
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Haansoft, Hansoft or Hands Soft?
Granfallon:
lol.
And it’s different here, because Koreans use EVERY PART of the phone. Not like Americans, who only use the prime cuts, and none of the risk materials.
You forgot one, which I think more accurately captures the government’s intent in using the HWP format to publish public information where pesky foreigners might get it: Hands Off.
So, are the prices of cellphones going to go down now, or will the iPhone be $750 here?
Seriously though, I could go graduate middle school and learn to text message at 200 characters per minute and then use an American made cell phone and just die!
@#3 Cactus:
I used to get by on the fact that you could open older versions of .hwp in Open Office, but it’s becoming increasingly useless as more and more stuff is published in newer versions.
In terms of saving as .doc, the formatting is often lost and you’re buggered if you don’t mess around with the encoding, much like the old days of OPen Office – Word cross pollination.
Thus my vote is for Dick-soft.
@#6 cmm:
Yeah baby! W750,000 iPhones and Nokia E71s.
Just because there’s no WIPI and the handsets are foreign, don’t expect the likes of SK Telecom and KTF to stop gouging their customers.
@ Hangul software:
Thankfully the online world of piracy has you covered with free downloads~ Weee
@8 Stafford:
But couldn’t they come in from foreign sellers or auction sites then hopefully forcing the local companies to charge, dare I say reasonable prices? (hoping so)
The low end-user price of the iPhone in North America is due to subsidies provided by the carrier, in cases where the user signs up for a long-term service plan at a monthly cost where the carrier knows it can claw back some or all (or all and then some) of the money from the end user.
Apple sells an unlocked iPhone in Hong Kong without purchase subsidy. It can be used with any carrier by substitution of the SIM. In the Pearl River Delta where people move from Hong Kong to Macau to Guangdong (and the market is open to competition) this is very common — I’ve seen guys switching out SIMs on the ferry.
The cost of iPhone in Hong Kong is HK$5400 for the 8GB 3G iPhone, and HK$6200 for the 16GB 3G iPhone. In Korean won, with VAT added, those prices look like W988,160 (probably KRW990,000) for 8GB and W1,134,540 (probably W1,149,000) for 16GB.
As for me, I’ll take the service plan with the carrier subsidy please.
There is a freeware Hangul HWP viewer called “오피스 뷰어(HaansoftViewer) v2007″ that can just read HWP files. Though it’s a whooping 51MG. And it can mess with your file associations, but that’s easily fixable.
Not that this really has anything to do with the phones, but the Haansoft Viewer works only if you use Windows. Linux users can download a 30-day test distro of Haansoft’s office suite for Linux, but it’s a bitch to install on Opensuse. Hwp also seems to be the file format of choice for many public institutions, which irks the living shit out of me, since gov’t bodies should be providing material in file formats readable by the largest number of people possible, i.e., not hwp.
But, Robert, all Koreans use a pirated copy of Windows XP and a pirated copy of HWP. Macintosh and Linux users aren’t Korean, and foreigners aren’t even people.
Distributing government documents in HWP is a deliberate policy choice to keep Korea for the Koreans only. Information is power, you know.
The other really aggravating thing Korean agencies do is fail to embed the fonts when they generate PDFs. So PDF is not a magic bullet. A lot of Korean-language PDFs open up as utter garbage on non-Windows (hello, Batang Che) systems. I think this is mainly up to stupidity rather than perfidy.
I’d like to see the government move to Rich Text Format (RTF) or Open Document Format (ODF) for distribution of editable documents, and sensibly-generated PDFs for non-editable documents — but I’m not holding my breath. Here is Korea.
I just don’t understand what the big deal is with the iPhone. I’ve seen it and used it and it’s complete useless over hyped garbage. I couldn’t get any work done it because the touch pads way too small and inaccurate. It takes 5 minutes to type my name.
Blackberry on the other hand, you can actually get your work done with it, touch pads or not. We have a motto here in our company, Blackberry is for real businessmen, iPhones are toys for kids with fad fetishes.
Mighty generous of the Koreans to let foreign phones in a market they control 95% of and where 9 in 10 Koreans already have a cell phone.
Koreans change phones all the time. I think I read somewhere that the average phones in Korea gets swapped every 6 months or something.
Deregulation would be good for the customers and Korean economy in many ways. But which foreign manufacture would benefit from it? I could only think of Apple iPhone.
SK Telecom is probably working to get a deal with Apple on iPhone if GSM network is available in Korea or Apple ships CDMA iPhone. The price point would be $200 on 8BG with SK subsidy on 2 or 3 year contract. Despite the battery problems, the young generation would love to have it.
But BlackBerry? I don’t know. How many Korean companies would like their employees to have push-down emails for immediate attention when they are just a phone call away or a text messaging away?
Look around in the subway or on the street. How many Koreans using data devices, or Smartphone for work? Most of them are using cellular handset for DBM (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), almost naked girl pics, Ya-dong, and text messaging services. I don’t see much demand on Smartphone or BlackBerry Market. Oh, Samsung Jack already been introduced in Smartphone market in Korea.
And let’s see other regular cellular handsets. Nokia? Sony Ericsson? & Moto Who? Maybe all of expat community would love to play with BlackBerry and other handsets on Korean carriers network. Yet, I don’t think Korean customers see much benefit on foreign manufacture handsets. IMO
I wrote earlier that Blackberries already work in Korea. I should have specified that the 8830 world edition alone does, as long as you have the international sim in it.
And iPhones apparently work too… A friend of mine, who works for Apple, just SMS’d me that she was in Seoul. And, of course, her phone is an iPhone…
BlackBerries will work very well in Korea if RIM gets Korean input and display right (I have *heard* of Korean input in some BBs, but was unable so far to get it on mine. Instead I have half a dozen Chinese input systems…). The fact that Koreans use data for crappy services doesn’t mean they want that and just that. They use what they are given. Give them emails and MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger and AIM Messenger and whatnot, and the possibility to slouch outside the office while still being reachable and able to read and send emails, and you’ll have an instant adoption. Pricing, as usual, will be the main barrier. But if that thing speakee Korean, it’ll be just as much of a CrackBerry as anywhere else…
BB 8707g works in Korea, btw…
BB8707g….. I stand corrected. Cool.
Don’t forget that one feature of BB emailing over texting is security. You have a password on the handset and secure transmission from at least the source to the telco. Are these same features available in other cell phones?
You also have blackberry servers managed by corporate IT that can deploy antivirus, antispam, and can limit which URLs can be accessed through the browser.
Bloody hell! It’s almost 2009 already! Can we get our heads around the whole “Korea only has a CDMA Network” thing already!
For the record (Again!) SK Telecom and KTF now run 3G networks (and infact have done so for over 2 years) on the 2100Mhz band.
This is the SAME as AT&T in The States and most GSM carriers in Europe. (Exception being T-Mobile in The US whose 3G offering comes in a 1900Mhz flavour).
Despite “3G”‘s technical name (W-CDMA) it IS a GSM standard NOT an old CDMA standard that you find on LG Telecom which is akin to Verizon’s service in The US.
Thus the iPhone works here while roaming as illustrated in a comment above. (in fact I saw one at Starbucks today!)
The problem with importing handsets to Korea are the Telecoms hardware lock their headsets to the network (In addition to the USIM lock).
Roaming headsets work fine, but there will be issues importing headsets, least of which being the lack of Korean input and local settings for SMS, MMS and internet connectivity – settings which are freely available on phones outside of Korea but are hidden by Korean manufacturers and Telco’s and not demanded by users because up until now no one has needed them….
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