By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Smartphones are going mass market, which has mobile telephony operators drooling over the prospects of a wireless Internet explosion.
However, the increasing popularity of these high-end devices is also giving the carriers a new headache in "jailbroken" phones, which are modified to enable users to run non-approved software on their handsets.
The country's smartphone boom has been ignited by KT, the country's No. 2 wireless carrier, which has sold more than 500,000 iPhones just four months into its local release.
Although KT is obviously delighted about the performance of Apple's do-it-all handset, which is helping the company compete against archrival SK Telecom for third-generation (3G) customers, all the talk in the blogosphere about the supposed benefits of a jailbroken iPhone can't be too comforting.
Worrying KT are users like Ham Joo-hyung, a 28-year-old Seoul office worker and a self-admitted "Apple junky." Ironically, Ham prefers his iPhone to be free from Apple's walled software environment.
Ham had been using a second-hand, jailbroken iPod Touch multimedia player, which is basically an iPhone without the phone, but has yet to decide whether to modify his recently-bought iPhone. However, he is certainly tempted to take the plunge, as a jailbroken iPhone would allow him access to a wider range of applications on the handset and also download Apple's paid content for free.
"I guess I would be worried most about security issues, as I will be accessing non-Apple approved software, and may fall vulnerable to malicious programs. And there is the problem that I have to connect the handset to the computer and reboot it every time the battery dies, and the batteries obviously die quicker for jailbroken phones," he said.
"But I think that many users would conclude that the strengths of a jailbroken phone more than make up for the setbacks. You are freed from Apple's limitations on multitasking or using Internet telephony in the Wi-Fi mode, and you can download all the paid Apple content through jailbroken phone community sites."
Jailbreaking an iPhone wouldn't require much sophisticated skill, with more than enough unlocking tools available on the Internet. There is also a wealth of alternative "App Stores" available on the Web for jailbroken iPhone users, including Cydia store, which appears to be the most popular choice.
KT is considering more ways to discourage iPhone users from jailbreaking their phones. One of the ideas is to limit Internet telephony and other voice functions on such phones, including blocking them from using voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype on its 3G network.
"Security is certainly a problem for jailbroken phones, as the strength of the Apple App Store is that Apple has been successfully screening malicious software programs for its users. After-service and Internet banking are also not an option for these phones," said a KT official.
Since releasing the iPhone at the end of November last year, KT has been managing to sell more than 4,000 of the handsets every day, company officials said, which represents one of the quickest starts for the iPhone in any country.
The popularity of the phone is certainly bumping up data revenue. According to KT, an average Korean iPhone user consumes 442 megabytes of data every month, which is more than 40 times larger than that of the average feature phone user, the company said.