We remember

It has been a year since Apple founder Steve Jobs died at the age of 56 after a long battle with cancer. Arguments are ongoing as to whether the innovation and dramatic changes in living habits and culture he initiated will continue. Early evidence from Korea, a nation fascinated with e-this and e-that, point toward a resounding “yes.’’

The iPhone 5 is expected to hit shelves soon here. A massive amount of ink and electrons will be spent in the following weeks dissecting and discussing what kind of an influence the latest Apple handset will bring once in local stores.

With apologies to politics watchers talking up the three-way battle between Park Geun-hye, Ahn Cheol-soo and Moon Jae-in ahead of the December polls, Korea already had its debate of the century in the winter of 2009. And the result was as lopsided as a Pyongyang election.

That was when KT, the runner-up mobile-phone carrier, dropped a bomb on water-cooler chatter by declaring to bring Apple’s revolutionary smartphone to Korean shores, much to the dismay of its largest handset provider, Samsung Electronics.

The nation threw itself in following weeks to dissecting and discussing what kind of an influence the iPhone will once placed on local shelves.

Optimists claimed that the Korean wireless experience was about to undergo an irrevocable reshaping. Pessimists bought into the talks of Korean vendors like Samsung and LG Electronics that they were already providing better the phones and predicted underwhelming consumer response for a foreign device that had been released years earlier in other markets.

The optimists had no idea how right they really were. KT was euphoric after the iPhone broke sales record after record, singlehandedly allowing it to get meaningful returns from its massive investment in third-generation (3G) technologies and breathing life into its nationwide Wi-Fi network that had been looking dead as a business model.

Samsung reacted with shock after its slew of “iPhone killers’’ like Omnia tumbled their way to the Smartphone Hall of Shame and it took some time for the company to redeem itself with its Galaxy lineup of gadgets.

LG was much worse off, paying heavily for the decision making of then-CEO Nam Yong, who claimed smartphones will eventually recede as niche products and it was better for the company to stick to its strength in feature phones. His ability for terrible predictions could only be matched by the Mayans.

Mobile Internet devices like smartphones and their bigger cousins, tablets, have dramatically altered the way on how people work and play. And it could be argued that the changes have been more striking in Korea than anywhere else.

Before the iPhone, the Korean computing experience was frustrating due to a Microsoft monoculture in computer operating systems and Web browsers, cemented by ill-advised laws on encrypted online communication.

The country’s computer security defense as a result has become porous as Swiss cheese and a slew of data massive breaches have turned everyone’s resident registration numbers, the Korean equivalent of social security codes, to Google search results.

It could be said that the immense popularity of the iPhone and the smartphone boom it triggered allowed the country the chance to right a lot of wrongs. With so many people using operating systems designed by Apple and Google, Korean authorities have been forced to rewrite the rules to allow electronic commerce and e-government services to function on software other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Smartphones are also proving an economic catalyst, inspiring entrepreneurship in mobile software and entertainment content. The latest example is Ani Pang, a Korean tile-matching puzzle game for smartphones. It has more than 10 million users who play for an average of 54 minutes a day, making it a candidate for an Angry Birds-like ascent.

Inadvertently, the iPhone also had a critical role in advancing Korea’s civil liberties. After being kicked in the teeth by bloggers over economic policies and the controversial decision to resume imports of American beef, the Lee Myung-bak government attempted numerous times to gag the noisy Internet rabble. The most controversial decision was to require users to make verifiable real-name registrations for leaving comments on major websites.

What policymakers failed to account for was that regulations that may have worked in a desktop computing environment won’t always do when the Internet is moving increasingly toward mobile devices.

The explosion of user activity from smartphones powered by Apple and Google means that an increasing amount of user-created content is walled off from Korean authorities. The popularity of smartphones has also driven the popularity of social media services like Facebook and Twitter, which have enabled users to comment about everything and anything without logging on to any particular website.

While it wasn’t until early this year when the government admitted that the real-name rule was a mistake, long after the restrictions were rendered utterly irrelevant.

It was precisely a year ago when Jobs died after a lengthy battle with cancer. What he was able to do when he was alive has transformed Korean living for the better. <The Korea Times/Kim Tong-hyung>

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