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Sony Ericsson to launch Xperia X1 next week in Korea

Mar 7, 2009 17:51

Finally, the Xperia X1 will land in Korea. One of the best smartphones developed by Sony Ericsson, the company opened its local office to launch the phone in the Korean market, with many staff hired from Sony Korea. That's good as Sony Korea has been downsizing its human resource in Korea with its recent HQ situation.

The Xperia is the second smartphone to come to the Korean market from overseas in 2009. HTC just launched its year-old model, the Touch Diamond, here a week ago. This is a rather late move from HTC which just released its second-generation Touch Diamond at Mobile World Congress 2009 in February.


Korea gets the dated Touch Diamond from HTC...


...While the rest of the world gets the next-generation HTC Touch Diamond2.

The Korean market was not a target market for major mobile phone manufacturers until last year, due to WiPi restrictions. But this restriction is going to be terminated from April, which is a great time for entering the Korean market with old smartphones, giving these a new lease on life, since the smartphone market in Korea has only just started to generate consumer interest. The deal is that there aren't many competitors even though Korea boasts three of the world's giant phone makers, namely Samsung, LG and Pantech. However, the trio do not really focus on smartphones for Korea.

Samsung only released the Blackjack, M470, Mirage and T-Omnia models over the past three years and finally got some good feedback from the market for its T-Omnia. LG just entered the smartphone arena with its mid-end model, the LG-KU2000 (known as Incite).

KTF, another mobile phone network provider in Korea, is also planning to import tje iPhone (a deal that has been in the pipeline for years now).

The funny thing is that Korea has always been known as a paradise for IT products, especially portable IT gadgets, but in the smartphone industry, I have to say we are really behind, like a year at least.

All the overseas models coming into Korea recently or getting ready to launch are a year-old even as the next-generation models have already been introduced at recent exhibitions. This is situation that I hate to see here in Korea, but the truth is these network providers let this happen. They keep trying to avoid Wi-Fi features from those mobile phones and try to make up for the lack the network with infrared all the time. They only started to change their minds after the iPhone hit worldwide markets and customers started asking for the iPhone and smartphones.

Now, MID is also starting to listen to customers in Korea and smartphones are being introduced within a similar time frame here. What is the difference between those devices? I guess it will be the size of the LCD and the operating system used. Korean MIDs are based on X486, like Win XP, but smartphones use various platforms. Let's see which device is going to roll out in 2010.

Personally, smartphones will be going down in Korea or mixed with high-end feature phones, and MIDs will take over that market in Korea.

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