[CeBIT] A glimpse of the future - hands-on with Korean handsets

"The Japanese are two years ahead when it comes to cell phones"

"In Asia, everyone surfs mobile Internet"

"Only old people use e-mail in Korea" 

These are some of the opinions one often sees floating around in the mobilist blogosphere. Yet we never get a chance to really try these phones and services for ourselves. News on sites like SlashPhone are limited to the hardware specs/design of the new handsets, but no asian bloggers ever discuss usability and features in English (if you know someone that does - please point me in the right direction!). Long story short, Samsung brought out some of their Korean lineup to CeBIT and we had a few minutes to play around with the devices (unfortunately, no pictures were allowed).

First impression - "Wait a second - that's my phone, but with so many more features!". Indeed, the body of the phone was identical to my D900 in every aspect with the exception of a small "TV" button on the side and text in Korean (which unfortunately I can't read). The menu was entirely different, however - it's clear that Samsung has a big, dedicated team serving their home market.  Other TV handsets we've seen can all be described as "bulky", so it always seemed apparent that the current state of technology did not allow for slimmer handsets. Here we are, however, with digital TV functionality in what was the slimmest slider phone of 2006. Impressive!

We tried the TV out and it was great - several channels, quality 320x240 video. It took about five seconds to switch from one channel to another, which is probably acceptable for most viewers. Wonder what the battery life is like...

The next application was a Tamagochi-like game. The user is asked to "adopt" one of three pets (we picked a dog), which can be fed, played with and taken for walks in interactive environments. The pet has many different parameters like happiness and agility - it's an easy to use, yet deep game with rich Flash-lite visuals. Kids must love this!

The 10-megapixel cameraphone that was also showcased featured business card recognition software. It takes a high-resolution picture of the card and prompts the user to assign the parts it recognizes to corresponding address book fields (picture, name, number etc). While the process was relatively easy to follow, it did not recognize all of the phone numbers properly and overall took too long - entering everything by hand could have been faster. Possible reason is the fact that image recognition seemed to have been done on the phone itself, rather then online and therefore probably lacked the CPU power.  

The most interesting part of the experience would definitely be the various services available on the phone. Unfortunately, without knowledge of Korean using them proved to be impossible (aside from a subway map). Still, the "Services" menu amazed us with more than a dozen available options. The unexpected part was that all of them led to wap-style pages with lots of text and a variety of different fonts and colours. There was absolutely no coordination between them - which is understandable, as they are provided by outside companies. Still, it felt like "we just left the phone" - it would be nice to see more embedded applications that match the overall feel of the device.

 All in all, the Korean phones amazed us with their design and the variety of cool applications. As the hardware parts they are made of are available all over the world, it's really up to the carriers and the software developers to bring richer services to North American and European markets.