[Hello from Korea! This was actually yesterday's diary - I had a few technical problems which is why this is only just going up now - Katie]
So after a bit of a distastrous start to my 3G tour of Korea and Japan (ie, I didn't wake up until someone called me to find out why I wasn't on the bus), I eventually managed to see some pretty interesting stuff (so I got to have a lie in and STILL didn't miss anything. Neat!) I'm here with Qualcomm, a company that I wasn't really familiar with - and I'm guessing that a lot of you aren't either. They're a phone technology company, responsible for the 3G chips in mobiles, and they've bought me and some other journalists out to the Far East to take a tour of the various handset manufacturers out here. Today we went to see Samsung to take a look at their Anycall Studio (Anycall is a Samsung phone brand) and I shot a video of me looking flustered and jet lagged in the T-World Zone phone shop (which you can see after the jump).
In the Samsung store, there were lots of high end cellphones on display, including this 7-mp camera phone (pictured top) with a 3x optical zoom lens. I had my picture taken on one and they printed it straight out for me. It was pretty impressive, I have to say, though I personally would hesitate to carry round such a enormous phone all the time. Oh, and I also saw the 3 Samsung designer phones we've featured on here, all of which were as ugly as they look in their photos.
The little video I shot was made in the T-World zone which is a very smart phone shop in Seoul where you can go to try out all the phones and see what add-on services you can pay good money for. Mobile TV is pretty big here, plus people are more inclined to spend money on music downloads and games, all of which were there for you to try out in store.
It's not the best video diary in the world, but I wasn't quite right in the head, having woken up just a while before hand and leapt out of bed.
The final stop of the day was supposed to be at a phone store designed especially for women, but apparently it's shut down to be re-done or something, so probably the most interesting part of the trip for me was sadly cancelled. Still, there's still plenty left for me to look at, and I promise the next videos will be a bit more informative! After that it was on to a Korean barbeque for some lovely meat and kim chee!
From: Five reasons Foursquare will be this year's Twitter