One of the first orders of business this week was acquiring a cell phone, which pretty much serves as a life line here. (I might as well have still been living in the States before I made my digits public here.) When I perused the selection at the cell phone shop at the Yongsan Electronics Market earlier this week, I was less concerned with buying the latest gadget with the most bells and whistles, but rather finding a phone that was intuitive and within my budget. Okay, and maybe a little pretty. The one I settled on is called the Sky IM-S300 Stylish Slim Slide in white.
After having a no-frills prepaid phone for the past few years in the States, the IM-S300 is rather high-end and luxurious for me. Released by the Korean company Pantech in December 2007, it includes many standard features that the newer cell phones have here: mp3 player, 1.3 megapixel camera, 2.2 inch screen display (that doubles as a mirror in sleep mode), and a Korean-English/English-Korean electronic dictionary. And after skimming through my user manual, I've also discovered that there is a scheduling feature, document viewer, "movie"/music video player, and video and audio recording capacity. According to the manual, I can record up to 60 minutes of audio on my cell phone! I can't attest to the quality of the sound recording, but it's nice to know that if I'm ever in a pinch and forget my audio recorder at home, I'll have a backup recording device on my cell phone (along with that mirror to check my eyeliner).
The IM-S300 was apparently marketed as the "Romantic Wave" phone, with its wavy menu buttons and pink and violet LED lighting on the keypad. I did a search for this model on a Korean search engine, and found a short animated ad for the phone. I'm not sure how long the link will be active, but I think the narrative the advertisers have created for this phone is definitely worth a chuckle.
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