Hunting down a handphone

I’m not a fan of cellphones by any means. In SA I had one out of sheer necessity, and I was more than happy to leave my cellphone behind when I came to Korea.

As I mentioned on a previous post SA cellphones don’t work in Korea (to my chagrin), so I’ve been without a cellphone (or handphone/handpone, as they call them here) for almost three months. After years of having it surgically attached to me, it has been pretty liberating not having to lug the damn thing around all over the place.

But this state of bliss could not last forever. Everyone here has a cellphone, and I mean EVERYONE. The kids in my classes have these superdooper souped up cellphones that can do your laundry and wash dishes. And since everyone wants my cellphone number, I finally succumbed to the need to have one, and took a stroll down to one of the gazillion cellphone stores down the road.

Luckily another native teacher had directed me to a store that sells “cardphones”. The Korean cellphone industry is not geared toward catering for foreigners, so generally we can only get prepaid, secondhand phones – here known as “cardphones”. Only some stores sell them, but there is one nearby so I popped in.

Normally I’d try and have a Korean friend with me to help with translation, but I figured I’d try it on my own first. So I walked in, said “Cardphones?”, and the assistant took out a selection. I saw one I liked, asked how much, and tried not to flinch when the assistant typed “150,000 won” on a calculator. That’s more than R1,000 for a secondhand phone that I’ll not be able to take home with me. So I said “50,000 won?”, and the assistant took out a small selection of battered and bruised phones. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I’m glad I found one that I at least liked. It looks like an old dictaphone, the camera doesn’t work, and the battery lasts less than a day. But I can phone without any problems, and sending an sms is pretty straightforward. That’s all I’m looking for, being the luddite that I am.

I was worried about the paperwork, but the assistant seemed to know what he was doing. All I needed to give him was my ARC (Alien Registration Card) and sign a couple of papers. There was some setup to do, since I went in on a public holiday, but I collected the phone two days later with no hassles. Mind you, this whole transaction was conducted in grunts and gestures, so I’m pretty chuffed that at the end I got a phone I liked for the price I was willing to pay. Not bad.

All that’s left is to work out how to find out how much my phonecalls and sms’s cost, and how to check my account balance. But in the meantime I’ll just use the phone until it stops working.

As an aside, my wife had a totally different experience. One of her co-workers arranged a contract phone for her, so she has a brand new cellphone and much cheaper call and sms rates. Foreigners usually can’t get a contract without paying a hefty deposit, or using a Korean credit card (which we generally can’t get either), so most foreigners end up with cardphones.

Using SA cellphones in Korea

(Edit: My wife and I tried the SMS Roamer I mention in the post below. To my embarrassment, it didn’t work. Just leave your SA phone at home and pick one up here. Saves lugging unnecessary stuff all the way here.)

The bad news is that South Korea uses a different cellphone technology (CDMA) to SA (GSM), so your SA phone can’t be used there. Big bummer for me, because I have two perfectly good cellphones that I now have to leave at home and go buy some dodgy second hand phone when I arrive in Korea. I’m not looking forward to that.

But there is some good news. If you are a Vodacom customer you can arrange to use SMS Roamer. Using this you can take your SA cellphone to Korea, but all voice calls (incoming and outgoing) are disabled, and you can only use SMSs and voicemail. The SMSs from Korea to SA cost R2.50 each, and from SA to Korea R1.74. People can still phone you, but they will be diverted to voicemail, which you can access in Korea.

This seems like a good idea to me for the first week or so before we get organised with a local cellphone, especially as my wife is stuck with a Vodacom Top-Up contract until July. At least we can get some use out of all that airtime!