Almost anywhere in the world you travel to, you should be able to locate public payphones fairly easily. In Korea, payphones are still to be found, yet almost without exception they are not being used. They stand almost as if they were monuments or relics, yet without the esthetic quality.

In Korea, given the level of mobile phone use, we find that the public phone industry is in great danger. Being a declining business, Korean telecom giant, KT, spun-off the public pay phone division, which is now KTLINKUS. Public phones are not used by the Korean public, and in its new attempt to garner some business KTlinkus has decided to let users pay for public phone calls with their T-Money (public transportation) card, and there are also plans to make it compatible with other types of cards. This will make it a little more convenient to use, but it is yet to be seen whether a measure like this will ever be enough to save the public phone.

Samsung is currently working on upgrades of their mobile phone, especially the smartphone market, reports Maeil Business, in order to give the iPhone a further challenge. As I mentioned before on this website, Samsung lost some market share to Apple, as have all companies in this segment, but Samsung still provides up to 40% of the parts used to produce the iPhone.

They plan to unveil more specs about the new phone at the Barcelona Mobile Phone Conference on February 11th. The phone will have web-searching capabilities, GPS, among other functions. Also, in another project, Samsung is also one of the partners in Android, one of Google’s star projects, in which Samsung and Google’s quest for the “Moving PC” have aligned.

We should all expect many interesting things from Samsung in this upcoming Conference, given their innovative nature and stylish designs, along with them securing a more dominant position given Motorola’s freefall.