iPhone Tries to Crack Korea...

Apple Inc.'s iPhone on Saturday(28th Nov 2009) will finally go on sale in South Korea, a country that prides itself on creating and consuming cutting-edge technology.
Since the announcement of its availability last week, about 40,000 people placed pre-orders for it, causing the Samsung Electronics Co., to slash the price of its most advanced and expensive phone, a touch-screen model like the iPhone called Omnia2.
The iPhone's arrival will also end the control that South Korea's cellphone makers and carriers, including KT, have had on the software that runs on phones. Applications for iPhone will be available through Apple's online service or directly from software makers.
Even so, the iPhone hasn't gotten that popularity in South Korea that it has in other countries and Apple faces a huge market bias for domestic-made phones, mainly by Samsung and LG Electronics Co., which contributes to about 90% of the cellphones.
In Japan, Apple experienced a slow ramp-up of sales after the iPhone became available two years ago. And in China, where Apple last month began selling the phone, sales have been slow due to modifications the company made at the government's request and the existence of a massive gray market.
South Koreans pay the highest prices in the world for cellphones and among the highest for wireless service. The average selling price for Samsung and LG phones is nearly twice as much in South Korea as it is outside the country.
The iPhone is already changing the pricing dynamic. KT will offer three iPhone models under monthly usage plans with charges ranging from 45,000 won to 95,000 won, or about $40 to $80. Depending on which plan is chosen, the iPhone's price ranges from $342 to free.
Samsung responded this week by making its Omnia2 phone free for people who buy an $80 monthly plan on SK Telecom Co., one of KT's rivals. It cut the $900 price on other plans to around $300.
"The most appealing part of iPhone is the variety of applications," In the case of the domestic phones, we ca use only those programs that are pre-installed on them.
A spokesman for KT Corp., the carrier offering iPhone, says it expects the iPhone to sell more quickly than in other countries because Koreans consider cellphones a way to express status and trendiness!

~Palm Takes on Giants in Smartphones ...

Palm, a new entry in the big list of mobile phone manufacturer came up with the all new, first of its kind of a Web-surfing pocket-computer phone 2002.
The team introduced a new generation of smartphones in June with the $199 Palm Pre on Sprint’s network. The second phone in the line, the $99 Pixi, went on sale Sunday.
While both the products got good reviews as per the expectation for being easy to use and great for Web browsing. But in recent weeks, the rival Google’s Android operating system for smartphones took not more than a week to grab the public attention.
Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive and the former Apple engineer (the first head of its iPod division), said in an interview that Palm does not need to be as big as its rivals to thrive. “One of the key things we need to do as a company is to get to scale,” he said. “We need to bring on more carriers and more regions.”
Right now, it sells phones in six countries and is steadily expanding to others in Europe and North America. Investors trying to read the mood of the consumer are unsure whether Palm will prevail. The volatility in Palm’s stock is a sign of the uncertainty over its ability to challenge the iPhone and BlackBerry. (Palm’s shares bounced up to $12.40 on Friday on speculation it would be acquired by Nokia, a prospect many analysts find unlikely.)
Palm looks particularly small if smartphone applications are compared. Apple’s App Store now has more than 100,000 apps. No other phone operating system comes close, though there are about 10,000 apps for Android. Palm has about 300.
Mr. Rubinstein said Palm would never need as many applications as the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said. He expects developers will write program code for Palm devices, in part because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites. Android, by contrast, is based on Sun’s Java language, and Apple uses a variation of the C computer programming language.
While Android is getting a lot of attention because it has attracted so many phone makers, those companies, Mr. Rubinstein, argues “have to depend on the kindness of strangers” — meaning Google — for their software.
“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience — the hardware, the software and the services — and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,”
“We did what we said we were going to do,” “We have done a really good job of laying a foundation for the company moving forward. Now we need to move quickly,” said Mr. Rubinstein.