fast mobiles, slow people
there have been two ‘mega-fast’ mobiles phones released in korea in the past couple of months: LG’s storm phone (LG-SH150) and samsung’s ufo phone (SCH-W300). equipped with an amazing 7.2 Mbps hsdpa data transfer speed, these new 3g phones only takes about 4.5 seconds to download a full audio track (assuming it’s about 4MB in size). nifty.
original image from here
i’ve been using the storm phone, and been a happy user. listening to ringtone and coloring samples has never been frustrating – only takes one second – and there’s always a decent selection of news on the nate page (mobile portal for SK) that it actually reduces my daily online news reading time on a pc.
considering the solid reputation of samsung compared to that of lg in the domain of mobile phone production, i would’ve definitely gone for the ufo phone had it not been so expensive: the phone itself cost me only about 100 australian dollars when i got it one and a half months ago (with gov. subsidies). ufo wanted to take a bit, well, a lot, more from my financial planet – costing four to five times as much.
storm, released on august 23, has not taken the koreans by its name: only 70000 sold so far.
ufo, released on september 3, not even close: 14000.
according to a yahoo!korea article (where the figures came from), the disappointing figures are mainly because of the network infrastructure that is still in need of upgrading to better support.
i assume that’s partly true, although i have never disappointed with my phone’s performance in terms of the content and the speed that both the phone and the network provides – this includes those times when i upload large photos (storm takes 2MP images, 1600×1200) and switching on a S-DMB channel, which takes about 5-10 seconds.
another reason, i think, concerns not the technological layer of infrastructure but the socio-cultural and financial ones. my research data so far show that young people (aged 18-24, whom i call trans-youths) here are not so crazy about going online with the phone. most of my participants only make voice calls, sms, play games (sometimes with friends via bluetooth), and nothing much else. they are not interested because it costs money, and they don’t really see the point. they can go online quick and easy (… and very high in bandwidth of course) pretty much any time and anywhere for free and/or very cheaply. i had the same findings in my last research about cyworld in which users were found unwilling to use mobile cyworld.
furthermore, ringtones and coloring services are a great online-music business platform and the codec’s improving quite a lot to ensure good quality audio. however, again to my surprise, the participants are not so interested. cyworld background music is a different story though, for various reasons.
younger people (teenagers), however, present a different story. they are a lot more interested in these things, and could probably afford to buy the storm phone at least (their parents would probably be ok with paying $100). but look at the design of it. would it appeal to teenagers? hardly.
along with technological improvements (better network infrastructure to support high bandwidth content transfer) there really needs to be more considerations to the design of mobile experience (which should also take great account of socio-cultural contexts in which the experience occurs). i’m hoping to find out more about this in my research, and share more solid ideas pretty soon – yes, the end of my candidature is looming … very quickly like the beautiful foliage falling all round here.
November 11th, 2007 at 2:07 am
Nice to hear about some new k-phones, after all this i-phone/g-phone hype - even if the k-consumers don’t want them.
Your candidature’s not the only thing approaching its end… I feel like I can see the whole global order of the 00s getting ready to pass on. The main indicator is the US economy, and I suppose the big question is whether the region-to-region ties that the rest of the world built up during the decade will allow it to “decouple” from the US and keep chugging along, or whether this is going to be a crisis for all those booming “BRIC” countries as well. But then there are those icier undercurrents like peak oil and climate change… I think they are going to define the daily political life of the world for years to come, even more so than they do right now. The current novelty is that they are being talked about nonstop (climate change at least), but the next decade is going to see action, whether or not it works. Green will be the new cyber and it will be just as manysided a development as the Internet has been… Anyway, please pardon the delphic outburst. If you ever want more, just sit me down one day and encourage me a bit, I won’t need much.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
no need to ask for pardon ;)
yes, eco-digital environment seems to be the one that’s slowly developing, and we are all responsible for at least paying attention to what’s going on. urbanism is one of the main aspects of my research and by the end of next year, half of the world population is expected to be living in urban environment. things to be thought about and take place … quickly!
December 20th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
There was an article in the Korea Herald today on the back-to-2G phenomenon.
The Herald has this stupid policy of making it impossible to link to individual stories, a policy I’m sure they will change eventually. The story is “Oldies but goodies: 2G cell phones still popular” by Jin Hyun-joo, it’s still on the front page at the moment, and maybe putting the title into a search engine will serve to retrieve it in the future.
Speaking of changes, there was also a good story on the meaning of the Korean election, “New conservatism rises to power” by Jin Dae-woong. “747 Vision” - cute.