wired, wireless, relentless

So there you are, sitting on the subway quietly reading the newspaper and minding your own business, when out of nowhere, a voice blares: “Where da party at?”

Don’t jump out of your seat—it is just the cellphone ringtone of the lad sitting next to you; it could equally have been an excerpt from Wagner, a birdsong, or even a recording of his girlfriend’s voice.

And while he’s talking, take a look at the handset he’s using. It might be minimalist matte black, or perhaps a metallic crimson and gold device. For maximum credibility, it will have an embedded camcorder, and a high-pixel LCD screen—preferably one that, when not in use, doubles as mirror.

Of course, as a visiting businessman, you don’t need this stuff. For one thing, you won’t be able to work it, as the manual will be in Korean. But you will need to hire one—because your cellphone almost certainly will not work while you’re here.

The reason Korean mobile technology is so cutting-edge is that the country chose the CDMA, rather than the more commonly accepted global GSM standard, in the early 1990s, to give it a leap on the competition.

The result? While Korea is now light years ahead of anywhere else, its cellphones are also incompatible with everywhere else.

The other great feather in Korea’s technological cap is its internet infrastructure: the country boasts the highest penetration rate of broadband in the world, and internet cafés—‘PC Bangs’—are ubiquitous.

The only problem is that these are not set up for business (and even less so for foreign businessmen). It’s all for fun. These 24-hour joints are jammed with cyber junkies frantically murdering each other in multi-player games, but if you want to type out a basic document in MS Word—good luck. Chances are, the PC bang won’t have MS Office installed on its PCs.

But what if it does? Well, the next hurdle is that the software will be in Korean...

So take a good look around: this is tomorrow. The personal gadgetry and high tech infrastructure is awesome, which explains why Seoul is used as a living test lab by high-tech companies from across the world.

Whether you will be able to work any of it—or, indeed, find any commercial utility for it at all —is another matter.