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WookJinRhaSecondPaper 3 - 26 Feb 2010 - Main.WookJinRha
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META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
The Arrival and Impact of the iPhone in Korea | | military paranoia, or for some other reason?
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> > | In 2005, Korea passed the “Use and Protection of Location
Information Act” for the purpose of “protecting privacy from leak,
misuse and abuse of location information, and establishing safe environment
of location information to encourage its use (Section 1).” The Act distinguishes
“Location Information Business” which collects location information, and
“LBS Business” which provides services using location information. In order
to conduct Location Information Business government permission is required,
whereas for LBS Business just filing of registration. Apple Inc. applied for
both Location Information and LBS Business, which they obtained. | | III. The Impact of the iPhone
1. Subsidy Competition on Phones
The launching of the iPhone is likely to trigger once again exhausting subsidy competition on phones among the mobile carriers and phone manufacturers. KT is subsidizing estimated around 500~800 USD per iPhone, and as a consequence other mobile carriers and phone manufacturers are also planning to increase their subsidy on new phones in order to maintain competition. Korea has already experienced the overheated competition of the phone subsidy in the past several years, which led to constant administrative order and pressure by the government to limit the amount of subsidy that could be provided. Subsidy given out by Korea's three mobile carriers in 2008 totaled 1.7 trillion Korean Won (approx. 1.46 billion USD) which is about 77% increase from the previous year. | | differently than more human-friendly
devices. | |
> > | I would say that the “content” here means applications
or entertainment bitstreams. In Korea for a long time, mobile carriers
were making huge money through the applications and entertainment
bitstreams they exclusively provided, and the iPhone has brought major
threat to this structure. The iPhone has also brought an attention to
the relative lack of wireless internet infrastructure in Korea, which
is mainly concentrated on wired internet connection. | | IV. Future Prospect
Recent report by a mobile market analysis company ROA Group expected the iPhone to do well in Korean market with sales to reach around half a million by this year's first half. The report also indicated that the existing smartphones in Korea which has MS Windows Mobile OS, have provided many people with horrible experiences regarding application expansion services. Due to these unpleasant experiences, MS Windows Mobile platform based smartphones will not be able to provide decent sales competition for the iPhone. See Report dated 30th November 2009 by ROA Group Korea http://www.roagroup.co.kr/. | | determinants of the Korean technical future are.
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> > | Professor, I once again thank you for your comments. | |
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