The Korea Times reports that mobile internet is the hottest issue among early adopters in Korea. The three most popular handsets these days according to online community Cetizen are all touch-screen phones specializing in Web browsing: Samsung’s Haptic, Pantech & Curitel’s CanU and LG’s Touch Web Phone.
These models, all capable of full web-browsing, are selling at impressive rates. Samsung says that it has sold around 30,000 Haptic phones in 15 days since its launch on March 25, which is about the double the daily sales of other new models. And its $800 price tag hasn’t been discouraging customers either. LG and Curitel’s Web-surfing handsets are each selling at rates of more than 1,000 a day.
The Samsung phone has haptic technology, which is being integrated into more phones both in the US and Asia. The new Moto Razr has haptics, which create a vibrating sensation on a screen. Samsung is also integrating new gesture technology with an embedded motion sensor. Though we agree with Engadget that such motion controls could make you look like a crazy person.
SK Telecom’s Haptic system is more expensive in Korea, many users feel that it is faster than Web Touch in displaying Web pages. Korean Web sites are usually crowded with traffic-heavy graphics and animation that make mobile Internet painfully slow, but the system circumvents the problem by showing a snapshot of the Web page to the user, instead of showing the original, data-heavy page. Watch a video of it in action:
Apparently, three telecom operators were reluctant to sell such full-browsing handsets because they wanted to tie their users to their own pay-per-view portal sites. But this year, they have changed their policies to allow their users full access. Improvement in network systems also sped up the connection speed of mobile Web.
Another reason that these full-browsing phones are fast gaining popularity in Korea is e-mail. in Korea, foreign smartphones such as Blackberries are almost non-existent due to strict government regulations on software and hardware configuration.
via The Korea Times
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