UPDATE:
Can I call them or what? It was the Saints over the Colts, 31-17. I was off by just one digit, which makes sense, because in my football dream a couple weeks ago, I wasn't wearing my glasses, so I got that one digit wrong. This would also explain why I predicted in 2005 that Osama would take the White House.
- High-ranking Chinese envoy Wang Jiarui meets North Korean officials at start of four-day Pyongyang visit (AP via WaPo, Bloomberg, Yonhap, Korea Herald)
- Robert Park, missionary released by North Korea after unauthorized entry and attempt to press Kim Jong-il directly for human rights in DPRK, arrives in US (AP via WaPo, Yonhap)
- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Obama administration policies toward North Korea and Iran are showing benefits (UPI, Bloomberg)
- Korea Telecom think tank says iPhone is paving the way for a new IT market worth 2.6 billion won by 2012 (Yonhap, Korea Times)
- SK, Apple's iPhone partner in South Korea, says iPhone sales have failed to maintain momentum and may falter (Korea Times)
- Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency to set up special task force aimed at crimes committed by foreign visitors ahead of G20 summit (Yonhap)
- KEPCO buys a 10% stake in Niger uranium mine (Bloomberg)
- South Korean business lobby in US convenes meeting in Los Angeles with American business leaders to push for ratification of ROK-US free-trade agreement (Yonhap)
- Korean national women's soccer team defend their championship with 5-0 win over Hong Kong in Tokyo (AP via Canadian Press, Yonhap)
- Former Prime Minister Lee Young-deok dies (Korea Times)
- Former baseball player who collapsed during a game in 2000, dies after spending ten years in a vegetative state (Yonhap, Korea Times)
Woman who underwent full-body Avatar tattoo in November 2009 sues James Cameron for excessively hyping movie over past few years: "That movie sucked, and now look at me!" (Hollywood Reporter)
Wow ... the Korea Times predicting more gloom and doom for the iPhone in Korea - what a shock!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the deal for all those blowjobs they're getting from SK and Samsung were in a written contract. Nah, probably just an oral one. ;)
BTW - KT is the iPhone partner here, not SK.
MikeInSeoul wrote:
ReplyDeleteWow ... the Korea Times predicting more gloom and doom for the iPhone in Korea - what a shock!
Well, now, they also announced that Apple was heading a 2.6 billion won new industry, so it's not as if they are completely one-sided.
BTW - KT is the iPhone partner here, not SK.
Whoops. I think when I was writing out those two stories I got them confused. It was the KT think tank that was talking up how great Apple would make things in Korea, not SK.
Actually, that first link about the billions due to the iPhone was from the Korea Herald, not the Times. There's actually no mention of the report in the Times.
ReplyDeleteNot that the report is worth a crap, anyway. It was funded by KT, so of course it says that their product is the second coming ...
The real issue is the article's author, Kim Yoo-chul. A quick search for his articles show that he's consistently biased towards local tech, and strongly against Apple:
google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.koreatimes.co.kr+"Kim+Yoo-chul"+iphone
Many of them come off as if they were written by Samsung or SKT themselves. Might make one angry, if it wasn't so sadly pathetic.
MikeInSeoul wrote:
ReplyDeleteActually, that first link about the billions due to the iPhone was from the Korea Herald, not the Times. There's actually no mention of the report in the Times.
Oh, dear God, you're right. No more outsourcing the Daily Kor to China! That post probably contains melamine as well, so wash your hands.
Seriously, my apologies for that bit of sloppiness. The way I do these has me looking at the KT and the KH last, and I must admit that I was in a slight hurry to finish that day. I guess I just got confused about which articles about Apple came from which paper, and It thought the three from Yonhap, KH, and KT were Yonhap and KT. Mea culpa.
Not that the report is worth a crap, anyway. It was funded by KT, so of course it says that their product is the second coming ...
True, that, except the KT report is called a KT report, so the reader is free to take that for what it is.
The real issue is the article's author, Kim Yoo-chul. A quick search for his articles show that he's consistently biased towards local tech, and strongly against Apple:
google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.koreatimes.co.kr+"Kim+Yoo-chul"+iphone
To be honest, though, that isn't all the different — only maybe more extremely consistent — than some of the tech here. I've been a loyal Apple customer since the 1990s, and for years I saw articles in the American press about Apple products where it appeared the author had never really handled one for more than five minutes. When Steve Jobs was not at the helm, the "Is [insert new product] the death knell for Apple?" or "[insert new product] fails to dazzle" articles were commonplace.
Many of them come off as if they were written by Samsung or SKT themselves. Might make one angry, if it wasn't so sadly pathetic.
Maybe they are.
Then again, tech articles tend to affect the biases of the writers and, ultimately, Apple products are still niche market gadgets.
I love my iPhone, but at the same time I realize that some Korean phones have for years been doing the stuff that make iPhones so cool. Yeah, a lot of these involve services that are in Korean and that Korean speakers — and not Anglophones — would use, but the fact remains that they're there.
In other words, I, an iPhone user and lover of all things Apple, am less optimistic than, say, Metropolitician is, that the current fervor is a sustainable demand and not just pent-up demand.
In particular, if KT ever ends the very favorably subsidized system through which they sell the iPhone, which makes the cost almost incidental, expect iPhone sales to drop considerably. Seriously, the dramatic difference in the way to pay for an iPhone in Korea versus Hawaii is so great that I considered picking up a second one this summer, even if I spend only a couple months a year in Korea while I'm in grad school in Hawaii.
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I also don't see the Korea Times tech writer's lack of enthusiasm for Apple as so glaringly bad because we can see the same thing here when it comes to the iPad. I personally think the iPad is way cool and — if it can run Word and things like that then it can replace my MacBook Pro as my travel computer — but I was surprised at how uniformly down on the iPad the response was. I was down with it; they were down on it.
Now I'm not saying this to defend the KoTimes tech writer; I'm just saying that his approach isn't so terribly different from many in the States, and some of what he's saying is prudent naysaying.