The Mobile Internet is Coming: Korean Web Portals Target Mobile Phones

There is a very interesting article in today's Korea Times, detailing how major web portals in Korea are now targeting mobile phones by formatting their material for handsets.   They include

• http://m.naver.com (a new arrival)
• www.daum.net (since January)
• www.cyworld.com (Mini-cyworld last December)
• mini.paran.com (Paran, the internet unit of KT Wednesday of this week)

As the article points out, traffic to mobile portals remains miniscule as most wireless users (including yours truly) won't touch their expensive data services.  However, as it concludes, all of this will change with the arrival of the iPhone and Android phones into the Korean market.  As noted in an earlier post the mobile market worldwide is shifting not just to smartphones, narrowly conceived, but to hand-held computers with flat rates for accessing the internet.  The sooner South Korea joins this trend the better for its consumers and exporters of mobile phones.