So, no, I can’t use my phone in Korea.

This is a desultory update of my attempts to get my Nokia phone working on a local contract here in Korea. One of my students is some kind of computer geek and confidently claimed he could sort it out for me. I thought he had some super secret method for busting the protection on Korean SIM cards but it turned out his strategy involved taking me to a phone carrier’s shop here and asking if I could use my phone on their network. I was kinda disappointed as I had already done this about ten times over the previous weeks.

Of course they said no, no big surprise there, but at least I got a clearer explanation as to why. Apparently all to do with each SIM card here being registered to a particular carrier and so are completely locked. In other countries it’s the phones which are locked, here it’s the SIM cards. I’ve tried googling to find out if there’s anyway of circumventing this but there’s scant info. So, that’s it then. I know that Korea will unlock SIM cards some time in 2008 so consumers have complete freedom of what phone they want to use with their card but that will probably be a little too late for me.

On the plus side, this hasn’t turned out to be a big barrier since I seem to very rarely have to use a phone here, probably a combination of living right next door to where I work, plentiful and easily accessible internet and email and no friends in the country. So, yes, silver linings and all that.

Stephen Fry is a tech head!!

I knew he was a bit of a geek, but now it’s official with the unveiling of his blog on smartphones. A truly titanic six thousand word essay written on his own personal history with these phones and an overview of some of the current devices on the market. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him so effusive about the phone I own, the Nokia E90. To be honest, the UI does suck a little and I thought he would rip it apart for that, especially considering his love for all things Apple, but he seemed to like it. Good on him.

Incompatibly yours, Korea

it’s ironic (possibly paradoxical, never quite sure of the difference between those two) that while Korean products such as cellphones, computers, monitors, cameras etc are helping to connect people all over the world, at times it seems as if Korea doesn’t really want the world to connect with them at all.

Case in point: anyone who’s ever tried to write to someone with a Korean email address from an English language computer will probably have had it go undelivered at some point. In fact, with some addresses, my email will only get through maybe one in three times. Now, I realise there are probably some code issues, especially with different alphabets, software programs etc, but surely this is something that should have been resolved by now. I mean, it can’t just be an alphabet issue: I’ve got several friends with Chinese and Japanese email addresses and I never have any dropped email issues with them.

Another case in point: sending an international SMS to or from a Korean mobile phone seems a exercise in trial and error. I’ve given people my number here and they’ve tried to send text messages from several places such as England, the US and Kyrgyzstan and again, only some of them get through and there doesn’t seem to be any logic as to why some sneak in and others don’t. The same applies to trying to send one back to them. Again, I’m sure this has something to do with the differences in the types of phone networks used (traditionally Korea uses CDMA while most countries use GSM), but c’mon, this is 2007, this can’t be too difficult to sort out. And again, I’ve never had this problem with any other country.

Certain other small things I’ve noticed. One thing I’ve been trying to get hold of for my phone is a GPS map in English so I can find my way around the place. Easy you would think, especially given that Korea seems to throw out some kind of GPS device on the market every couple of days. Wrong. I have scoured the internet and I’ve come to the conclusion that no such map exists. Really, you can get a map in English for almost any country in the world, including tiny African states and all the former Soviet states, but you can’t get a map for one of the most developed countries in the world. Why?

This is not some kind of eurocentric rant against an alien, eastern culture. I’ve lived abroad for most of my adult life, and I’ve lived and worked in 9 different countries of varying prosperity and development. It just seems in Korea there is an almost willful desire to do things their own way and if that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the world, well then the rest of the world can just suck it up.

I’m not 100% sure what point I’m trying to make here, but I’m convinced I have one. Something about Korea being engaged with but withdrawn from the rest of the world at the same time, about a certain insularity which is coupled with a conflicting desire to embrace the rest of the world (or at least the parts they find attractive). As I’m clearly tailing off into nothingness, I’ll stop now.

Give me big eyes, yes I’m working it

Koreans are camera crazy. Yeah, I know it’s a stereotype, but I suppose it must be borne out of a kernel of truth. Any outing, social gathering and they will take pictures of literally anything. But for me, the strangest thing they take pictures of is themselves. You see it a lot, people turning their camera around, holding it at arms length and taking a snap of themselves. What’s even stranger for me is that they often do it alone and in places that are not paricularly photogenic. So, you’ll see a woman having a coffee in Starbucks and she’ll suddenly turn her camera or phone around, give a pout and flirty sideways glance and take a picture of herself.

There must be an explanation for this. I mean, it surely can’t be just for posterity (‘hey, look this is me in the cafe at the end of my street’). Maybe it’s a surreptitious replacement for a mirror, since it’s mainly girls and women I see doing it, though I haven’t noticed they are particularly shy about getting mirrors out in public. For me, it seems such an oddly vain thing to do.

Jesus of the nuclear yhales…precisely

I wasn’t sure whether to write this post, largely because it involves pointing out some weird Korean English on a t-shirt and this is a pretty trite thing to do for someone living in the far east. I mean, jesus, there’s hardly any bag, item of clothing, shop front or pencil case that doesn’t have some bizarre mangling of the English language.

But, the circumstance of this and the what is written on the t-shirt make this pretty special. My son has just started going to daycare, and today he was a little bit sick down his shirt so they provided a replacement. Now, please bear in mind that my son is just over two years old, so this t-shirt was designed with very young children in mind.  I present to you…..

It’s difficult to know where to begin with this. The juxtaposition of lesbian and Nazis is particularly resonant, while the ‘ettuce growers’ (lettuce?) hints at a seething resentment of either a) subsistence farmers, b) vegetarians or c) both. And I fear that the ‘jesus of the nuclear yhales’ is a concept that will remain forever elusive to me. And the boycott? Not sure but it does involve a cabin kid, a concept that I thought died away in Victorian novels (or am I thinking of stowaways?). Anyway, it really is a thundering masterpiece and I’ll be encouraging my son to throw up more over the coming days to see what other shirt daubings he can delight us with

This is rather good news

A few posts back I wrote about the difficulties of trying to get my foreign phone to work on a local contract here in Korea. Despite all my best efforts, I haven’t been able to find anyone who can work out how to make this happen – not even the dodgy little back street phone merchants.

However, today a work colleague who knew about my problem told me that in a few months time the law will change here in Korea to allow the complete  free swapping of sim cards between phones. This will mean that I can then use my phone here. Ok, I may have to wait a while, and until that time I’ll be carrying around a very expensive address book in  my pocket, but that’s very good news. Of course, he may be wrong, relying on ‘bloke in the office’ as an expert on complex telecommunications law may not be wise, but I’ll take optimism over details for the moment and assume that it will all work out.

Only available in Korea, and not even there…

One of the things I was looking forward to when coming here was to get a look at some of the gadgets destined only for the Korean market. When reading some of the most popular gadget websites like Gizmodo and Engadget, I would often see some really fancy mini-computer or cell phone, but then it would say ‘unlikely to be ever seen outside Korea’. So, I thought, cool, I should be able to see some of them in the shops here. There were three I was particularly keen to see.

First off, the Samsung mini-projector.I think projectors are pretty cool, but I’ve never owned one, partly due to price but mainly due to bulk. I travel alot and l don’t fancy adding another chunky gadget to my luggage plus all the damn cables. But, the idea of a palm-sized projector that I could easily throw in my bag and then use as a mini home theatre when I’m at home, in a hotel room etc, I find pretty damn appealing. You don’t get much perspective from the photo, but this could easily sit in the palm of your hand.

The next gadget, also from Samsung is the P9000, a kind of phone-cum-computer-cum-PDA-cum-UMPC. One thing I love in gadgets is miniaturization, especially with computers/laptops, and I’m also a sucker for anything that folds out, swivels, rotates or transforms in some way into something bigger or sexier. This gadget has both, and also has Wibro, a kind of city-wide wifi. I remember seeing the press releases for this gadget and being super pissed off that this would probably never be available outside Korea.

Connected to this, I wanted to see the Raon Digital Vega, supposedly the smallest computer able to run Windows XP. I wouldn’t buy this, just too small, no wifi and no keyboard being the main reasons but I just wanted to see what it looked like and to have a good old fondle.

But, but, but, I haven’t seen any of these three gadgets anywhere in Korea, and trust me I’ve looked. I’ve been to the big electronic markets in Seoul and Daegu, searched round the tucked away, specialist computer shops in both cities and found nothing. Where the hell are they? Do these devices really exist or is this some big joke by the Korean tech industry? Maybe they just make up these outrageous gadgets, put together some vaguely working prototype and then laugh behind their Soju imagining all of us Western folk drooling over them. If anyone has seen any of these gadgets here, I’d love to hear about it…

You are now entering the Electron Zone

For a gadget freak going to a big electronics market in Japan or Korea is the spiritual equivalent of a Muslim going to Mecca or a Catholic going to Lourdes. Hey, if you can’t find it there, you can’t find it anywhere. In Korea, the holiest shrine would be the Yongsan market in Seoul, the largest gadget market in the world, but I’m not able to travel at the moment so I’ll have to make do with the local equivalent here in Daegu, the rather snazzily named Electron Zone.

Now, I have been here before but I thought this time I’d take some pics so you can get a feeling for what these places are like.

The first thing to mention about this place is that it’s bloody miles away from anywhere in the city. They stuck it right on the outskirts of the city in this odd complex which includes an exhibition hall, a textiles market and a furniture market (I think). They all look like huge warehouses, but, you know, modern. Getting there was tiresome. It involved a subway ride, a substantial hike and then a lengthy bus ride, all with a slightly bored and tired two-year old in tow who decided to fall asleep when we were halfway there. This is also a way of explaining in advance the poor quality of some of the photos since they were taken with a sleeping child slumped over my shoulder and so a few of them have that shaky, blurry cam thing going on. I also wasn’t sure how keen some of the vendors would be with me taking pics of their shops, so I was trying to be as surreptitious as possible, not using the flash and quickly taking the photos when noone was looking.

Ok, so here’s the first picture from outside the market. Not really a market of course, but impressive nonetheless. Three huge floors, mostly of gadgets, though for some odd reason on each floor there is a small section devoted to ornate mahogany furniture. Go figure.

This is just inside the building on the first floor. This one seems largely devoted to cameras, mp3 players, household appliances and the Korean favourite, electronic dictionaries.

See, this is just one of numerous shops selling these little clamshell dictionaries and the range is incredible. In the rest of the world they are something of a novelty, but here they must be big business since all the major manufacturers such as Iriver, Casio, Sharp and Sanyo knock them out here. I work with teachers here and the one gadget you can guarantee they’ll have is an electronic dictionary.

Ok, onto the second and third floors, and this is where all the phones, PCs, laptops and GPS/DMB systems are. Here’s a big stack of PCs, presumably so those Korean teenagers can play Warcraft on the most up-to-date system possible. Lots of GPS systems as well, another obsession with the folks. Most of them also seem to have some kind of digital TV as well, so when you no longer need directions you can just kick back, drive and watch Smackdown Wrestling or something.

Ah, now, this is more interesting to me. UMPCs – basically very small laptops – all laid out. These are made by Kohjinsha, a Japanese company. The screens can also fold over the keyboard so you can use it like a tablet PC. Prices seem cheaper than in the west.

This is a sexy little beast, the Fujitsu U1010, a 5″ screen tablet UMPC. You don’t really get much perspective from the picture, but this thing is small. You can easily hold it in the palm of your hand. I would be tempted to get this, but I just bought a phone (Nokia E90) which pretty much does what this can do and is much more portable. While I love the look and feel of the device, it’s not really small enough to carry in your pocket, and not really powerful enough to use as your primary computer. I say that now of course, but I might end up buying it eventually.

After an hour or so of wandering around the market, I began to get a tremendous sense of deja vu. There ARE loads of gadgets here, but most of them are the same. Endless shops selling Samsung and LG monitors, PCs, laptops, hard drives and flash drives. Very impressive but can get a little dull after a while. My son also roused from his sleep and he doesn’t share my love of gadgets, so it was time to go home.

My plan over the next few months is to visit some gadget markets in other cities, especially Seoul and Busan and see if I can find more interesting stuff to photograph and report on.

The wine lake, the butter mountain and the wifi hillock

I remember when I was younger people on the tv would talk about the surplus of food in Europe and would talk about the wine lake and the butter mountain and I genuinely thought there were huge silos somewhere with massive edifices of pure Lurpak and pools of Chardonnay. I appreciate that’s not the case now but the image certainly stuck at the time, and would like to apply it to Korea as I’m convinced they have a secret wireless internet mountain stored somewhere which could easily be made available to poorer, wifi-starved countries.

The reason I say that is that despite the fact that wifi is ubiquitous in Korea, I almost never see anyone using it. Most coffee shops, banks, restaurants seem to have some kind of wifi available, either free or through a subscription service such as NESPOT (similar in nature to the T-Mobile hotspot service). My phone has wifi, so whenever I’m indoors anywhere I quickly scan for access points and almost always pick one up.

And yet, I’ve never really seen anyone using it. When I was in Europe or America, it was very common to see people surfing the net on their laptops in places such as Starbucks. Here, I’ve never seen that. My feeling is that people do almost everything on their phone through 3G or at home on their PCs. Most phones here are not wifi enabled, I think because the telecom companies don’t want people to use it for internet telephony or surfing and dent their profits.

So, I reckon somewhere in Korea there are huge warehouses stacked with unused wireless internet surfing. And I think it’s rather selfish of the government not to let developing nations have some of it at a knockdown price.

You just don’t see people wearing bluetooth headsets in Korea..

The title pretty much says it all. But really, I saw a motorbike delivery guy wearing one today and realised that this was the first person in six weeks I’ve seen with one on. What’s with that? Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly approve, I suspect that anyone who’s willing to wear one of those things is, well, deep down, something of a dick. I’m just surprised that in such a cellphone obsessed nation they wouldn’t be more popular. Wonder why not…