Korea and Its Big-Ass Smartphones | Hacker News Reader

Korea and Its Big-Ass Smartphones

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43 pointsekianjo45 comments

I lived in Seoul 2012-2013. Generally I think this post is accurate. Here are some general observations from my time there:

- there's a small but growing startup community growing there who were very welcoming to foreigners.

- you only see web developers with macs. A basic 13" MacBook can cost close to $1800 there.

- already in 2013 there's was a huge surge of people with these larger phones in Korea.

- trends travel very fast in Seoul. riding the subway, you'd see a smartphone game become popular and die out over a 2 week period.

- mass transit is very efficient. Last night I heard Gavin newsome claim that the Bay Area has one of the best mass transit systems in the world. All I could do was laugh.

Forget about looking abroad, NYC's public transit is far better than the Bay Area's. But Newsom is a politician, so blatantly lying and generally being incompetent is part and parcel of his job.

Ugh, yeah. I love being able to go to the subway any time in NYC. SF's BART stops running very early.

> A basic 13" MacBook can cost close to $1800 there.

As far as I can tell, Apple prices in Korea are the same as in Europe. The US seems to be more an exception than Korea.

I used to think my iPhone (4) screen was big enough. I could do anything on it that I needed. But now that have a larger Android phone, everytime I test someting on the iPhone, it seems so little and toylike.

Well, as another data point, I used big-ass android and switched to 4S and found it to be much more appropriate size.

Ordered in 5S not 10 minutes ago, and I'm afraid it's not really gonna be better form factor.

I do find your "toylike" adjective appropriate. But I don't think that's neccesarily a critique.

Interesting indeed! I usually struggle with the general size of the icons and the width of inputs being so short that only a dozen characters fit on there. What are some advantages that you experience with the 4s screensize?

Mostly single-hand maneuverability of device, is what I find most useful.

I'm pretty dexterous person with medium-sized hands, and weight and form factor of 4S allows me to easily fetch it from any side, flip it, access any button, and manipulate any point on screen while still keeping weight center in palm of my hand, not fingers or, god-forbid, fingertips.

I sort of could work with Samsung's SII, but SIII I couldn't tolerate.

Smaller phones fit more easily into pockets. Also, anecdotally and in my experience, they have better battery life.

I actually find that a bit surprising. I would expect with a larger form factor one could fit a bigger battery into the phone (like an iPad has much better battery life than an iPhone). A longer charge would be more motivation for me to upgrade my phone to a larger size than a bigger screen.

Indeed, my iPad lasts days longer than my iPhone.

The Galaxy Note line is well known for its battery life. Note that screens are 2D, while batteries are 3D. So battery size can increase faster than screen size.

Possibly this is due to the larger screens being primarily Android, which had/has worse power management than iOS. I'm out of the loop on the current state of the relative power management between the two, so this may have changed in the last year or so.

But anecdotally, my friends who carry Android phones keep their chargers nearby in their purses/briefcases.

Current Android devices with smaller screens almost universally have less powerful hardware. A slower CPU, slower GPU and smaller amount of RAM will consume less energy. They also tend to have lower pixel densities, which usually mean higher light transmission (with LCDs) and therefore less energy spent running the backlight. There's also less area to illuminate.

As the sibling said, I immensely value the single-handed usability. Even the 5/5S screen is approaching too big, because my thumb cannot reach to the far corner of the screen.

If the rumours of the iPhone 6 having a bigger screen are true, I really hope they don't gimp a smaller version to have less grunt. That's my main gripe with small-screen android phones - they're technically inferior to their physically larger counterparts and marketed as the midrange option.

I am a big guy with big hands.

And yet, anything bigger than 4 inches is too big for me. I want to use 1 hand. I want to toss it on my pocket and forget about the thing. If I need a tablet, I will get one.

My eyes would get strained on a iPhone 4 after reading articles or browsing the web. So I switched to a Galaxy S4 I love the bigger screen size but I am still partial to iOS, thankfully I still have my iPad.

Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8CmD...

Thanks, though it's a shame that all the graphs and pictures are missing.

Thanks, OP here. Not sure why the server went down (I have a caching function enabled), will see what I can do to put things back online... :P

Still down

I am a Galaxy Note 1 first day owner, now on Galaxy Note 3, waiting for 4.

As I partly lived in Bangkok, it's common all over Asia, to like big phones. I don't know why only westerners complain "man, it's too big!". That was never a complain the asian countries I traveled.

For me, I also don't care of the bigger size. It's only a plus, since you see more, better, more clear, more content, better media consumption. It fits in your pocket.

Now I'm back in Switzerland, one of the last "iPhone nations". On public transport I see those small screen iPhone users and they look at my Note with that "man, you're weird" expression... Haha

I don't know why only westerners complain "man, it's too big!".

When carried in the left-front pocket of my pants, my Nexus 5 slightly encumbers my ability to bend my left leg. Were it any taller, the encumbrance would not be slight. I also find it difficult to use the keyboard one-handed and to reach the notification bar when gripping the phone so as to be able to use the keyboard. If it was any taller or wider, these difficulties would turn to impossibilities.

I understand the appeal of a larger screen, but convenient, comfortable pocket carry and one-handed use are more important to me than how much content it can display. I use a Real Computer when that's a priority.

It is true that big phones are popular here in Korea. It is not uncommon to have more than an hour in public transport to get to work, two hours happens quite frequently as well. Some people even have a telscope antenna for tv reception in their phones.

Using the telephone as an entertainment device on long commutes doesnt explain it all though. I think there is a small part status symbol in screen size, and the fact that korean phone makers have few other ideas in what to improve in their next top of the line model.

As a Korean, the most surprising part of this article was that there was no mention of KakaoTalk. (But Naver was mentioned.)

KakaoTalk is literally the reason why people buy smartphones here. Seriously.

So it's the korean version of whatsapp ? funny how such 'simple' needs are the market driving force.

WhatsApp has a much more minimalist feel than KakaoTalk. Take a look at some screenshots[0]. On the upside, it supports PC, but idiotically, it's a desktop app (Windows-only), rather than a web app.

Their revenue streams are very different too. Whereas WhatsApp relies on subscription fees, KakaoTalk has a built-in gaming platform. It also sells "stickers," basically emoticons you can send to friends.

0: https://www.google.co.kr/search?tbm=isch&q=카카오톡+대화

I thought it might also be the other way around. Because everyone gets a free smartphone even with the cheapest contract, KakaoTalk has this huge market.

> Japanese manufacturers were notoriously absent from these stores, except for the Camera section where Sony and Canon were widely represented.

...meanwhile, in Japan, 'who are Samsung?' 'Didn't know they made phones...'

Yeah, and they even remove the Samsung branding on Galaxy S phones... you just see it at the boot screen but nowhere it is written on the actual phone.

Do you know why this is?

Because Phone companies here do not advertise the models, and they rename them with their own brand line names, minus the manufacturer's name. It's probably because they don't want to make it look like these phones come from outside of Japan.

In China and Hong Kong I've seen similar trends -- much bigger devices, and far more of them than in the UK and North America. The decreasing cost of high-resolution displays and being located closer to the electronics manufacturing capitals of the world probably also play a role. When buying a smartphone people there will generally choose the biggest size that comfortably fits in one hand.

I wonder if the size categories came from how the device is intended to be used; I've only seen the screen-size distinction but suspect it's more like this:

Smartphone: can be easily held and operated with one hand

Phablet: can be held between the thumb and fingers of one hand, but big enough that many operations will require two hands

Tablet: designed to be held and operated with two hands

Smartphone: can be easily held and operated with one hand

I think this is getting stretched a bit with the current crop of 5"+ flagship phones. I have very close to average male size hands according to http://theaveragebody.com, but I find my Nexus 5 difficult to use one-handed. It was nearly impossible before I made a case for it that gave me a better grip.

Men with smaller than average hands, and women with anything but unusually large hands will probably find the Nexus 5 and similar phones hand to use one-handed. Samsung and LG have already exceeded this size with their flagship models.

Maybe that's because the term "phablet" is still foreign to many and they want to emphasise the phone functionality, so that's why they continue calling them (no pun intended) smartphones. 5" is right on the border between smartphone/phablet.

I presume the author lives in Japan? Living in Korea, I find the different perception interesting. To me, Korea is much more modern than any Japanese city. In contrary, to me Japan has some kind of "old flair" everywhere. Just how you'd expect from a nation that boomed some time ago – where the success has settled, so to say.

That contributes to my general perception of Japan as being very very different from all I know. Compared to that, Korea is much closer to the US or Europe. For traveling/exploring Japan is awesome, but talking about living I know why I chose Korea.

Two reasons why the iPhone is so popular in Japan:

1. It's free on contract (yes, the latest version)

2. You can type Japanese easily with just 3x4 keys (which made it perfectly suited for old flip phones), and so many use this method even on smartphones. Much easier with a small screen than Korean (which typically uses a keyboard the same size as English on smartphones)

Edit: my bad, looks like there's a 10 key Hangul input method for iPhone[0]. I haven't seen it used very much though, probably because it looks like a pain in the ass to use (compared to the 3x4 setup for Japanese), sort of like how no one would use T9 to type English on a smartphone, even if the screen were small.

0: http://emscloud.tistory.com/m/post/176/slideshow?order=2

> 2. You can type Japanese easily with just 3x4 keys (which made it perfectly suited for old flip phones), and so many use this method even on smartphones. Much easier with a small screen than Korean (which typically uses a keyboard the same size as English on smartphones)

Nope, I saw koreans using a very similar input method for korean with a 3*4 layout and they all seemed to be using that, making it very fast for them. On Android devices.

Btw I have an android phone in Japan and you can do the exact same thing on Android for Japanese. No difference with the iPhone, really, at least on that aspect.

You're probably talking about something like Moakey[0], but this is nowhere near universal. More importantly, it's not available on iOS[1]. This may be fine for younger people, but it wouldn't be so easy to use for older folks.

0: http://lovingkorean.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/moakey-keybo...

1: http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg168/owbee/Mylinguistics...

Nope, it was not this one. It was a 3*4 layout and the top row were the "vowels" (I know that's not the right word for it, but well...) you combine with the other letters to make full korean signs. This is apparently standard on Korean phones. At least Samsung ones.

Well, I don't know what you saw, but this is the default Korean keyboard on a Galaxy S4: http://cfile22.uf.tistory.com/image/2469083B51DDE07613BAE1

Maybe there's a toggle option.

Yes there is, and OP is right, an awful lot of people still use the 4*3 keyboard, even on phablets. For instance, last year Pantech was advertising the fact you can use the Vega R3's keyboard with one hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ObLdqUOHU#t=30

This cached version has the pictures, apparently: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfW8Cm...

Im currently living in S Korea and most the people I see have Samsung Note 3's. I think they've sold 10 million of them here? I've also not seen more broken screens anywhere else than here. Teenagers and young peoples phones screens are broken. They use them so much they drop them a lot more probably and also might be partly because of the alcohol.

http://xkcd.com/37/

Works every time.

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