Smartphones are going mass market, and the public’s growing appetite for social media will drive the boom to newer heights, industry watchers say.
The proof comes in the form of the football frenzy of the World Cup, the raging global party that shakes the foundation of the planet every four years.
Outdoor rallies, dubbed by the local media as ``street cheering,’’ have been established as a core tradition of the massive football fandom here, but it appears that touch-screen phones are quickly replacing beer cans and balloon sticks as main cheering props.
Social media applications based on mobile phones had a significant role in organizing the fan gatherings in public squares, stadiums and other locations in the past weeks. Thousands of rain-drenched fans were seen frantically fingering their iPhones and other data-enabled handsets to post every moment of euphoria or heartache on Twitter.
Despite the tech-fueled enthusiasm back at home, the Taeguk Warriors crashed out of the tournament in South Africa, painfully suggesting that perhaps the most-talented generation of footballers in Korean history were never to be good enough to consistently compete with the world’s best.
However, the current World Cup is also essentially the first one for the social media and smartphone generation, and underachieving footballers aside, the experience has been a blast.
According to Digieco, the economic research unit of telecommunications giant, KT, the global Internet traffic measured during the World Cup opener was 66 percent greater than the peak during the previous tournament in Germany. Much of the increase was likely due to social media services such as Twitter, which allows users to report their real-time status to computers and phones through short messages.
KT is also reporting a jolt in mobile Internet traffic during the World Cup, contributed by the country’s growing users of Twitter and me2DAY, another micro-blogging service that is popular with Korean smartphone users.
Combine this with the country’s advanced mobile service environment, which include digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) mobile television services and rapidly-expanding Wi-Fi coverage, and it seems safe to declare that smartphones and other premium handsets are becoming mainstream channels for media consumption rather than complementary ones.
Red-eyed commuters on subways and buses watching reruns of the late-night matches through DMB or cellular data networks are a common sight these days. According to the Internet company, Daum (www.daum.net), which is providing live broadcasts of the World Cup matches on the Web, over 46 percent of its 3.4 million subscribed viewers as of June 23 were accessing the games through their mobile phones, significantly more than what the company had forecasted.
``Considering that smartphones, despite the recent boom, account for just 5 percent of all mobile phones used here, the influence of social networking services in the way people enjoy and react to the World Cup matches has been larger than what anybody had been expecting,’’ said Seong Hyun-mi, a Digieco researcher.
``Through data-enabled mobile phones and social media applications, it’s now possible to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time. These increasing number of people among the `digital crowd’ are enjoying the World Cup experience individually and yet collectively at the same time.’’
Smartphones had been a hard sell due to their lavish price tags and the lack of a content ecosystem, but with the market finally having sexy-enough devices such as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Electronics Galaxy S to intrigue the average consumer, the country is on the cusp of a mobile Internet explosion.
The country’s three mobile carriers _ SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom _ barely had 300,000 smartphone users at around November last year, right before KT put iPhones on Korean shelves. By the end of this year, the number of Korean smartphone users are forecasted to be anywhere between 3 to 4 million.
Social media becomes killer applications
Korean Internet users got their feet wet early in social media services, thanks to pioneering services like SK Communications’ Cyworld (www.cyworld.com), which provided a prototype for globally popular services like Facebook and MySpace.
However, with the social media drive increasingly relying on mobile devices, powered by operating systems developed by Apple, Google and other multinational technology companies, the geographic boundaries of Internet services finally seem to be blurring as global platforms such as Twitter are gaining an edge over Korean-language services.
Smartphones, which work more like handheld computers than conventional phones, rely on a wealth of software and content to provide sophisticated functions, and social media is quickly becoming a ``killer application’’ among them.
This has handset vendors integrating social media features as a more integral part of their smartphone designs. Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10, one of the most powerful devices presented from the Google-backed Android mobile platform, arguably flexes the largest social media muscle. The touch-screen handset boasts two signature applications in ``Time Scape’’ and ``Media Scape’’ that allow users to blend their mobile and social communications, including text messages, e-mail and Facebook updates, into one, while offering quick access to photos, music and videos.
Sirius, another Android smartphone made by Korea’s Pantech, also offers a unified management tool for a variety of social media services like Twitter, Cyworld and me2DAY. However, Samsung Electronics has been blasted for its decision to exclude its ``Social Hub’’ functions, which allow users to integrate and streamline e-mail, text messages, calendars and social-networking feeds, in the Galaxy S handsets sold in Korea.
According to a recent survey of about 1,000 Korean mobile users by Digieco, 43 percent of the smartphone users said they use Twitter, with usage apparently boosted by the regional elections in June and the recent World Cup tournament. me2DAY, a me-too product developed by Korea’s NHN, which operates the country’s most popular website, Naver (www.naver.com), was another popular social media application, used by around 25 percent of the smartphone users.
Cyworld, which has nearly 25 million subscribers, appears to be struggling to leverage its desktop dominance in the mobile realm. Only 20 percent of smartphone users said they used Cyworld, according to the survey, compared to 33 percent of the users of conventional feature phones, who likely access the service more frequently through their personal computers.