20400520, Entry#12, Smartphone?

Summary
Contrary to the situation of other countries around the globe, smartphones are not welcomed in Korea. Currently the most famous smartphone, ‘BlackBerry’ is used by people in over 120 countries with 14 million subscribers.
Unlike the world trend, Koreans don’t like something large and heavy especially mobile phone. But recently some changes to the larger and bigger phones can be seen in the market.
Going with the tide of smartphone trend, SKT is planning to introduce the BlackBerry in Korea in the second half of this year. No.1 mobile phone maker in Korea Samsung Electronics also is going to releasing their own smartphone ‘BlackJack’ later this month, and Taiwan-based HTC is expected to introduce its ‘Touch Dual’ at the same time.

Opinion
Through this article we must think about what should be done first to launch samrtphone in Korea. Of course, market analysis must be preceded. Because Korean mobile market(phone, internet, banking etc) is totally different from rest of the world. In Korea, there is little or no concept of ‘smartphone’ in contrary to the else where in the world.
I suggest that smartphone is not needed because ‘mobile internet’ function, which is the most powerful function of smartphone, is not useful in Korea. As there are no inconveniences using internet anywhere in Korea, mobile phone users are not expect to use mobile internet which is relatively expensive than LAN.
One another main reason that I don’t recommend launching smartphone is because that the demand of smartphone would be too small. As we all know, percentage of using mobile phone in the purpose of business is not so big. Relatively large percentage of people is using mobile phone as common supplies. These people don’t need mobile internet or Qwerty keypad system. On the other hand, entertaining functions such as camera, MP3, mobile game is needed.
Related industries must close look at what consumers wants, and develop their own competitiveness to fill consumers needs.




20400520 Jeon Keong Won
reference: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2890252