3rd Generation Portable Phone

Domestic portable phone market is rapidly conforming into 3rd generation (cdma 2000 1x).

The manufactures predict 70 - 80 percent of the markets in the latter half of this year will be overwhelmed by the cdma 2000 1x and are working hard to develop and promote new products.

The cdma 2000 1x is 2.5 generation between ISO95B (2nd generation, currently used) and IMT-2000 (3rd generation) but it is not different from the 3rd generation quality service.

Its biggest difference in comparison with current portable phone service is to provide a real-time image service, which couldn’t be offered so far, and its data transfer speed is as twice as faster. In Korea, such service started last October for the first time in the world.

Major manufacturers, such as Samsung Electronics or LG Electronics, began to sell the basic cdma 2000 1x terminals near the end of last year and have increased the market shares steadily for the first half of this year. For the latter half, most of the manufacturers are expected to stop producing the 2nd generation models. Thus, the markets are anticipated to be rapidly shuffled focusing on cdma 2000 1x, including color liquid crystal terminals.

Samsung Electronics have already produced 8 types of cdma 2000 1x terminals, including `SCH-X200’ (color liquid crystal real-time image video on-demand (VOD) portable phone) and popular models during the first half of this year. 17 percent (520,000) of their sales out of 3.2 million portable phones during this period were from cdma 2000 1x models. They expect 2.5 million (78 percent) portable phones of cdma 2000 1x will be sold out of 3.2 million total estimated portable phone sales for the second half.

LG Electronics produced popular color liquid crystal portable phones of `Cyon Color Dual Folder CX 300’ series which are on sale from June 2001. They have allocated half of the 2.16 million estimated portable phone sales to cdma 2000 1x. Sewon Telecom recently showed `Sky IM2400’ for 011 numbers and `CPD510/520` for 019 numbers and plan to produce PCS model for KTF. Kim, Kwangtae, Executive officer of Samsung Electronics, said, ``cdma 2000 1x will be a good service to satisfy both general consumers who want various contents and business customers who demand to transfer data. In particular, the demands to change model for the portable phones will be significant.``

Moon Kwon-Mo africa7@donga.com