New lifestyle, office culture brings Smartphone

New lifestyle, office culture brings Smartphone...
The recent launch of the iPhone is bringing about remarkable changes in the local consumer market and offering challenges to related industries in the country. This is the first of a four-part series on the changes and challenges in the local smartphone market. - Ed.
Jung Hye-won, a 29-year-old PR manager for BK S&P, a local business solution provider, threw away her big, heavy suitcase after she bought an iPhone last week.

"I frequently move around and I had to carry my laptop, camera, MP3 player, PDA, mobile phone and cables to connect them," she said.

The iPhone freed her from the chore of carrying the heavy load.

"I feel much lighter and my work-life seems to have become much easier than before. I also don't have to look for coffee houses that offer Wi-Fi networks anymore. With this smartphone, I can check e-mail and surf the Web anytime, anywhere," she said.

Jung is one of a growing number of iPhone users in Korea who enjoy new lifestyle benefits offered by the smartphone, which is developed and manufactured by U.S. IT giant Apple.

According to KT, Korean customers snapped up 250,000 iPhones as of Jan. 10, less than 50 days after the phone was released here. KT, the country's second-largest mobile carrier, is an official partner with Apple in charge of selling iPhone products and receiving after-sale service requests.

To date, no other mobile has reached more than 250,000 unit sales in less than 50 days, according to a KT official, even though the market has been dominated by popular phones manufactured by Samsung and LG.

Other smartphones have changed office culture as well, asking employees to be more time efficient.

"I am a slave to my smartphone because I have to check my e-mail 24 hours a day. Now I can't give the excuse to my boss that I couldn't check my e-mail because I was away from the office," said Chung Seong-jun, senior associate of the equity sales team at Daewoo Investment and Securities.

Chung added that it is better to send messages to his clients abroad with his Blackberry than talking on the phone.

Unchallengeable tenet of modernism in men's fashion

Unchallengeable tenet of modernism in men" fashion.....
The future of men's fashion ,It is an unchallengeable tenet of modernism that things should be practical: that means clean, simple clothes
Want to know the definition of a fashion victim? It’s someone who, when he is eased into the glowing white interior of a hospital MRI scanner and hears the beast hum into life, thinks about what his legs and feet must look like sticking out of the end, and chides himself that he could have chosen his outfit better.
A psychologist might argue that this was a classic example of displacement, worrying about your clothes instead of your health, but I disagree. You see, the man in the scanner was me — I was a bit poorly before Christmas — and I can tell you, having to spend almost half an hour in a piece of kit straight out of Stanley Kubrick does weird things to you. You can’t move and there’s nowhere to look apart from straight up, so it’s little wonder that your mind goes a-wandering — and mine ended up contemplating this conundrum: if hospital equipment has become so incredibly high-tech, why are we still dressing like our grandfathers (who, let’s face it, would have been impressed by a stethoscope)? And if our sartorial sense had kept pace with advancing technology, what kind of thing would go with your state-of-the-art MRI scanner, anyway?
It would have to be clean and simple. I say this not because I have seen the future and it dresses like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, but because I have seen the past and it is an unchallengeable tenet of modernism that things should be practical and easy to maintain. Take the earliest fitted kitchens, for example. The Frankfurt kitchens of the late Twenties were designed to be hygienic and efficient, just as future fashion will, I believe, be unfussy and ergonomic.
This is the kind of thing that you find at labels such as Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, Prada and Dior Homme, where the look is pared down and simple, eschewing fussy decoration for sleek design. It is a black, partially see-through single-breasted coat for spring by Prada (just in store, £850), made from what the company calls “perforated wool tech” and with matching trousers available; or a white (or black) C.P. Company goose-down quilted short jacket in chintzed cotton poplin, fully reversible with a contrasting colour on the opposite side (this is an autumn/winter style, currently on sale exclusively online at cpcompany.co.uk, down from £395 to £197.50).