53,000 Pre-orders -- South Koreans Can't Wait to Get Their iPhones!
Pre-orders for Apple's iPhone, set to debut in South Korea Saturday, have already hit 53,000 on carrier KT Corp. With a market of over 400,000 smartphone users and 47 million handset holders in general, and entrenched local competitors like Samsung and LG, AP quotes the former as saying it thinks Apple will "invigorate" things.
Very likely. The iPhone has apparently already caused SK Telecom, the largest in South Korea, to drop service prices for the Samsung Omnia. Apple has also shown the ability to turn dumbphone users into smart, so growing that 400,000 towards that 47 million is no doubt what KT Corp is really interested in.
If you're picking up an iPhone in South Korea, let us know how it works for you!
[Special thanks to cherryhead25 for previous iPhone in Korea tips!]
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler. Follow him on Twitter @reneritchie
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I lived in Korea for a year. And I seem to recall the most popular phones there were as small as you can make them covered in little stick on rhinestones with little hello kitty type charms or something similar. Even the men had artwork and charms hanging off their phones. Be interesting to see what they do to one of these.
They have no EDGE/GSM network to fall back on, or to use to save battery life, in South Korea do they? Indeed I didn't even think SK Telecom had all that big of a 3G network anyway!
@Gregg yes I agree. I think the initial excitement will fade. They have always been cutting edge in mobile tech and other than the games on the iPhone there isn't any real advantage to owning one. The iPod touch is already very popular there anyways.
@Frog S. Korea has a HUGE 3G network and SK isn't getting the iPhone KT is.
@Rene thanks for the (non) props for tipping you off that the iPhone was coming to S. Korea. I sent a tip on the 23rd right after the story broke.
Too bad this site has become a place for recycled news. The Smartphone Experts shouldve created they're own iPhone site and left this one alone. This site is not nearly as good as WMExperts is.
Wow cherryhead that's so classy they don't recycle your tip so now the while site sux for recycling other peoples? LOLoser.
The only thing that sux here is sone of the commenters.
We love our commenters, we just wish they would stay on topic and talk about the stories, not each other
@cherryhead25: We didn't cover the iPhone launch announcement for Korea, our bad, only so many slots and time in the day. We caught this AP story because of the large number of pre-orders, which contrasted with the lackluster Chinese reception. Still, as I said we love our commenters and tipsters, so I added a link (and credit) to the bottom of the story. Much appreciated. We're painstaking about attribution, and will always default to giving more than less
As to not being as good as WMExperts, in our defense, who is?
hey you should put some iphones on south america too.. theres also iphone users here. me
@cherryhead: what does it honor a man to honor himself? Rene did the mature thing giving you credit but your complaining for credit (and bashing the site) just comes off shallow and immature.
I bet they paid full price too :L
http://www.freeiphoneinitiative.co.uk
Korea has all kinds of cool stuff we don't hav here. They had xbox360s miffed with terabyte hard drives and clear cases. None of the phones look anything like what we have here. I don't know where they come from but we don't have anything compared to what they have there. We have the iPhone. They have flip phones with huge hi res screens. That actually look really good. They have monopoly issues like a mofo down there too. KT seems like they own everything. We had Samsung Internet on base. 1meg download was like $49. Ripping people off. It's cool when you can go downtown and walk right into a video store that only sells pirated movies. That cracked me up. Usually the same people modding the xboxes. Don't even wanna talk about the cab drivers. Driving 140km back to the base. Now that I've gotten off the subject. Sorry Rene. They should have an ok turn out for the iPhone. South Korea population being 48 million.
I think the pre order was over 65,000.
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