It Becomes Possible to Exchange Character Contents between the Three Mobile Phone Companies.

The character connection service between mobile phone companies has started on the

11th; therefore, users are able to send and receive character contents with the

subscribers of different companies. The three mobile phone companies such as SK

Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom announced that they combined their character contents

downloading service network, so the subscribers could send and receive characters

regardless of their phone numbers.

The character service, which appears on the liquid crystal display of the personal terminal by downloading pictures or photographs, is one the typical wireless Internet services such as phone bell downloading service. It takes 20% of the whole usage that buying the service to give it to others as a gift, so the industry expects that the market will grow even bigger. The connection service between companies is only for the 256 color contents right now and it will be expanded to 4 grays and 65,000 color contents. Subscribers must pay extra 300 won on top of the actual phone charges to send contents to subscribers of different phone service using the connection service.

Tae-Han Kim freewill@donga.com