Editor's note: Part 1 of this feature series can be found here.
Today, on an all-expense paid tour of Samsung facilities, I visited the Samsung Gumi (sounds like "KOO-mee") plant, which is the largest cell phone manufacturing plant in the world, according to company reps. If Gumi alone were its own company, it would be the sixth largest company in South Korea (Samsung is by far the largest, by the way). The plant houses thousands of workers, and has not only a dormitory and social areas, but also a movie theater and even a real university, where employees can earn degrees through the post-graduate level, at a discount.
Of course it is always interesting to watch a manufacturing plant in action, and the phone plant was no exception. I watched a Samsung SGH-U600, their so-called Ultra Edition II 10.9 slider, being built from chip to package. What struck all of the journalists on the trip was how much human involvement there is on the assembly line. Workers watch the phone's progress, then test the phone and clean it off before putting it in a box. With a special SIM card, a worker even makes a quick call on the phone to make sure it works properly.
After touring the plant, our gracious, and generous, hosts took us out for dinner, and we had time to talk about Korean culture and cell phone use. First of all, every Korean we saw had something dangling from their phone. Our PR guide had a small mirror and a USB key, though both were quite cute and stylish. Various ornaments adorn even the slimmest phones. Men, too, were in on this fad, though most of the masculine dangles could be excused as screen wipes.
Also, though Samsung has a few QWERTY phones up their sleeve, including the upcoming BlackJack 2 (about which we know nothing, cough), I didn't see many Koreans typing on QWERTY keys. I saw plenty of cell phones, and the Koreans I met were quite casual about tapping out a quick SMS note, even at times when I might not answer my phone, like during a meal or at a casual business meeting. Still, with all that texting, you might expect Koreans to prefer QWERTY keys, but this isn't the case.
As our guide explained it, SMS simply caught on too quickly in Korea for QWERTY phones. Though phones like SGH-i607 BlackJack exist with a Korean character set, most locals learned to type quickly, and one-handed, with a 12-key pad. School children can type without looking, as I'm sure they can in the U.S., and our guide told us that students have been known to cut a peep hole in their desks to catch a quick glance at their screens when they get an incoming message, though they can respond without attracting attention. As a former High School teacher, I was obviously mortified by the idea.
Koreans also use mobile TV more than Americans, though most Americans aren't covered by a mobile TV network. Still, even with only three broadcast channels available, we saw plenty of Koreans passing time on trains and in public watching their swivel-screened TV phones. Perhaps this is because of the Korean commuter culture, which gives people plenty of time to kill. As a culture that prefers driving over public transportation, Americans might not find mobile television nearly as compelling as, say, GPS navigation on their phones. For that reason, we were pleased to see Samsung finally release a phone with GPS built in, the SGH-i550. You can read my hands-on impressions of that phone here.
Read on in Part 3 here.
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