DigiHunter

Korea No.1 Web portal--Naver Mobile service

May 26, 2009 20:51

Two weeks ago, Korea's No. 1 Web portal and search site Naver invited the press and bloggers to share its ideas and plans for a mobile service. With the mobile Internet market emerging, most of Korea must have been wondering how Naver was going to act on this trend. But it has been quite quiet till today. With Naver one step behind in the mobile service, second-tier players in the Korean Web portal space, such as Daum and Paran, have begun launching their own mobile portal sites built for mobile phones and mobile devices that have Wi-Fi or WCDMA wireless network support to access the Internet.

Naver blog page on iPod touch (Credit: Lazion.com).

Funny thing is Naver and Daum, two major Web portals in Korea, are focusing their mobile Web portal service on the iPod touch. They are not targeting smartphone users. What this mean is that they still believe the smartphone market in Korea will not grow parallel to the overseas market, and that the GUI and OS aren't good enough to push them into developing their platform and services for the smartphone.

I agree that the Apple iPod touch has the best GUI among the mobile devices, and it has a generous 4-inch LCD display, too. However, Apple hasn't even released its iPhone here in Korea yet, and the iPod touch requires a Wi-Fi AP to actually connect to tne Internet. But these portals believe that this is good enough as the device to push through their various services to mobile users.

What about the sales numbers of smartphones and Apple iPod touch players? Well, according to some figures which came out after Q1 2009, smartphones sold about 0.2 millon units in Korea, but the iPod touch sold over 0.5 million units. This number shows that we really need the Apple iPhone to expand our smartphone market in Korea. I just hope the third-generation iPhone can be released here.

These are the number of services that Naver plans to launch over the mobile Web with their existing PC Web portal services.


Naver Calendar sync with iPod touch (Credit: Lazion.com).

Calendar, Address book, Blog, Cafe (community service), Search, Jisikin (like Google Knol), Webtune (Comic), Wingbus (Travel), me2day (like Twitter), N Drive (Web hard: 5GB free).

From the above, me2day, Blog, Webtune, Wingbus, Map and Opencast (Web news) will be key applications for a smartphone.

It is weird that Naver is concentrating its future on mobile Web services for an MP3 player like the iPod touch, rather than a smartphone that is capable of connecting to the Internet all the time if the mobile broadband plan cost is no object.

What I can tell you is that Apple has really left a big mark on the Korean market without even doing much. It has changed the Korean mobile phone regulations and created a smartphone market here and it is leading the way to mobile Web growth.

Here are some of the pictures and videos taken by my friend who attended Naver's press event.


Naver Photo Album service on the Web and the iPod touch (Credit: Lazion.com).

 

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