Great point about all the tech and gagdetry — nearly all the phones here are touchscreen. I was looking for a phone with a qwerty keyboard and most stores didn’t have one.

The point I was trying to make is that unlike electronics, the internet is universal. Having net access is almost “marketless”…you can’t really set a region code on the web and it comes in every language.

An addiction to touchscreen phones here may not translate into similar tastes for North Americans. I can totally see that preference being country-specific. And everyone in the world is tied together by one common trait: we’re lazy. If NA broadband ever gets to the speed it does here (and I hope it does, because it’s awesome) …all kinds of new problems are going to surface, and it’s going to be very interesting.

Korea’s broadband is definitely no joke. I remember downloading something and seeing the speed shoot over 8mb/s and thought “holy shit.” Korean internet is ahead of the rest of Asia though, so you can’t really generalize.

As for seeing the future, markets have a funny way of not turning out how you thought. When I first started going to Japan 10 years ago and saw all the tech gadgets I thought “wow, this is what the US will be like in 3 years.” And then it never came to pass. Mini-discs caught on in Japan, but didn’t here. The US also took a very different path in cell phone technology opting for big, clunky more computer like smart-phones.

There are also infrastructural challenges as well. Countries like South Korea and Singapore have advantages of being smaller countries and building most of their infrastructure further along in the development of the tech/internet era. It’s much easier for them to build a cohesive, highly interconnected structure. The US has a massive challenge in updating antiquated phone/cable infrastructure to get consistent broadband speeds that can compete with Korea.