Category: Telecom

Stop me if you have heard this one before, but it is now being reported that the iPhone is going to come to Korea — really for real this time.

Nothing has been officially announced yet, but speculation is the iPhone will roll out by November, in some sort of partnership with KT. But you will forgive me if I do not hold my breath in anticipation.

First, the positive spin (from the WSJ story):

Industry participants said Wednesday’s decision is a big step in changing all that because it will bring more price competition to smartphone handsets and because so much software is available for the iPhone from Apple or developers rather than strictly through phone carriers.

“It basically opens a new world,” said Lee Chan-jin, a pioneer of South Korea’s software industry and chief executive officer of DreamWiz Inc., a mobile software developer and Web portal. “Korea’s cellphone software industry was sick, but I expect it to be reinvigorated with iPhone.”

Yes, the Korean telecoms’ attempts at creating app stores have been dreadful. So the competition from Apple should be invigorating.

But there is also a negative side to this change. Much like the Blackberry ruling last December, which allowed the Blackberry to be sold in Korea, no regulation or law has been changed to allow for this change in policy; the government bureaucrats just decided to start interpreting the regulations differently.

This, imho, is not a good thing. Doing business should be about following the laws of the land. Transparency. Playing games with government officials is about as opaque and murky as can be. It invites backroom deals, payoffs and all sorts of shenanigans.

So while I appreciate the government regulators taking a step forward, it is frustrating to see just how backward their thinking still is in too many ways.

I just ran across the blog by Kim Chang-won, Web 2.0 Asia, which I quite liked. Chang (as he calls himself) is the co-CEO of the Internet startup TNC (which was acquired by Google Korea a year ago), and he has a real gift for explaining some of the quirkier aspects of Korea’s IT industry as well as the future of the web in Asia (although mostly Korea).

Among the posts I really like of his are this great take-down of SK’s terrible apps store, Samsung’s attempts to join the app store market, the lack of iPhone in Korea, and even an escort business map of Gangnam.

All of which remind me, if you are interested in Korea tech issues, you should also check out Channy Yun’s Korea Crunch (including an interesting post about Twitter and its Korean competitor Me2Day) and
Techno Kimchi (although this is not being updated much these days). And there is a nice overview of the top Asia tech blogs at OpenWeb.

Btw, I thought this was amusing — when I went to check out Web Standards Korea, I found this:

I really want to complain about the latest stumbling blocks facing Apple’s iPhone in Korea. Now that the iPhone appears to be squeaking past the Korea Communications Commission’s first hurdle (the WIPI non-standard), the KCC found another bureaucratic roadblock. Which leads KT journalist Kim Tong-hyung to write this great line:

The country claims itself as the mobile capital of the world, and yet it has managed to fall behind nations such as Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea in securing the planet’s hottest mobile device.

I want to complain… except I live in Spain and find myself equally unable to procure an iPhone. Very different problem over here, though. Here, Apple has a local operator (Movistar). But Movistar does not appear to have any iPhones in stock anywhere in the country. In fact, according to the comments at blogs like this one, it seems like the iPhone is out of stock around much of Europe.

I assume it has something to do with the Apple’s iPhone contracts around Europe about to end in the coming months (as mentioned in the WSJ the other day). But it is still pretty annoying.

Looks like Korea will finally be getting the iPhone, the Blackberry and all those other nice, international goodies of the modern age. The Korea Communications Commission has just ruled that started in April 2009, companies will be able to see phones in Korea without its obnoxious WIPI non-standard. Huzzah!

WIPI was a local “standard” developed back in 2001 that, unfortunately, no one else in the world considered worth using. Instead it became a de facto trade barrier, as it was not worth it for non-Korean phone companies to make their phones WIKI-compatible just for this one market. The result — no Blackberries, no Nokia, no iPhones in this supposedly tech-savvy market. Kind of weird. Definitely inconvenient.

You could tell that the barrier had to fall sooner or later. Blackberry, for example, hosted an event at the Pusan International Film Festival back in October; I doubt they would have done that unless they knew they would be coming to Korea soon.

Now, do I go for the Blackberry or the iPhone… (Since none of my friends like their Heptic or Prada phones, I doubt I will be buying either of those options).

Apple head honcho Steve Jobs just announced the brand-spanking new 3G Apple iPhone, and it looks quite nice. NY Times story on the announcement here. One quibble on the story, though — it ends with:

The only major countries without an iPhone distribution agreement are Russia and China.

Does that mean the iPhone has a distribution agreement with South Korea? Or that Korea is not considered a “major country”? Apparently the second instance is true, and Korea is not getting the iPhone yet (last paragraph in that link).

For geopolitics, I agree that Korea is not a big fish. But for telecom and mobile services? Please. The Korean market is so much bigger than China’s. The Korean market is a major one.

It gets tiring dealing with dimwitted editors in New York or wherever that don’t get this. Like how everyone squeals about how big the China movie market is growing, when Korea’s is well over twice as big. Of course, at the rate China is growing (assuming you believe their statistics)(which I do not), and the rate Korea has stopped growing, China could overtake the Korean movie market in three or four years. But still… the point is Korea has been a bigger movie market than China for a decade (which, considering China’s past, essentially means that Korea has always been a bigger movie market than China).