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By Root 444 0

with both SK Telecom and Korea Telecom, so roaming was seamless and surprisingly cheap. Outgoing calls within South Korea cost less than 10 cents per minute, with incoming calls costing about double that (owing to the charge for delivering the calls long distance from China to South Korea). Data roaming was still expensive, at a rate of about $1.50 per megabyte, and text messages cost about 10 cents each. All features worked seamlessly, and Chinese government restrictions on accessing certain websites were enforced. When roaming in Korea with a Chinese phone, your data is still forwarded through a gateway in China, so your mobile web browsing is subject to Chinese laws and regulations.

North Korea uses a GSM system, but a side effect of the jammers used to block radio and television signals coming from South Korea is blocking of mobile phone signals from the north. Technically, South Korean WCDMA handsets are backwards compatible, but cannot roam on the system. In North Korea, WCDMA and CDMA-capable handsets are not available which effectively prevents any attempts to use the South Korean system (and presumably, North Korean users won't be allowed to roam anyway).

Unlike in Japan, smartphones have made tremendous headway in Korea. They are tremendously popular; most people I saw with a mobile phone across two visits to Seoul were carrying one. Approximately 60 percent of smartphones are powered by Android, according to KCC (the Korean equivalent of the FCC) statistics. Local brands Samsung and LG are the most popular, probably due to their superior Korean-language support and localized features. As in many countries, local search and application providers have the most popular applications, with Naver (a local ISP and online services provider) leading the pack. Google, however, is making headway with its search engine on mobile phones (although not on traditional browsers), largely owing to its integration with the Android platform. So is Facebook, although like Google, it seems more popular on mobile phones than on PC browsers. One smartphone platform that is practically missing - as in Japan - is the iPhone. You do see people with iPhones, but they are more expensive and less popular than the heavily localized Korean brands.

Despite the adoption of smartphones with high-resolution cameras, QR codes seem not to have caught on at all. You see them everywhere in Japan, and they are growing in popularity in more developed parts of China. However, I only saw one QR code across two visits to South Korea, and it was on a Korean Airlines boarding pass. This is somewhat surprising, given the low cost, high quality, and high speed of data services in Korea. Downloads run at 2Mbps and with WCDMA, you can download your email and make a phone call at the same time. This is important, because Koreans, unlike Japanese, make relatively more phone calls and send relatively fewer text messages.

One particularly interesting - and growing - area of mobile telephony in South Korea is mobile payments. SK Telecom has run a proprietary system for the past few years, but there are only limited places you can pay. Recently, they made an agreement with Japanese carriers KDDI and Softbank to develop and roll out a system called NFC. This system is based on an RFID-enabled SIM card, which broadcasts at 13.56MHz. The billing platform is developed by Visa, and is called PayWave. This allows up to eight credit cards to be linked to a single mobile phone account. Additionally, the platform allows for the application that nobody seems to want but never seems to go away - mobile coupons. Your carrier can use your GPS coordinates to send you coupon spam, and these can be stored on your NFC SIM to be presented wirelessly at merchants along with your payment credentials. Providers are very tightlipped about the technology and there is very little published research on the platform, but they have publicly stated that it is based on "ISO7816 or 14443 standards." The SK Telecom system is branded "T-Smart Pay." Time will show just how smart it is.

Innovation