G'day everyone,
I do a fair bit of travelling between South Korea, Italy and home (Australia). However I always hit trouble whenever it comes to phones working overseas. Italy is no problem - buy an Italian prepaid SIM card and use that. However Korea is a totally different proposition entirely - I have to buy a second-hand phone and use that. Unfortunately while calls work fine, things like SMS's never seem to work whenever I'm texting back home in Oz, they seem to disappear into the aether.
So in order to resolve this issue of having to have two phones (plus 2 SIM cards) on me all the time, I am after the following phone:It has to be compatible with (preferably advanced-level) networks in Australia, Italy (this shouldn't be too hard as they're both GSM-based) and South KoreaIt has to have sufficient multi-lingual support both in terms of reading AND writing messages in Korean, Italian and EnglishI'd prefer not to have a PDA if I can help itI did some research and came across the LG-KW9200 Worldphone which SEEMS to be what I'm looking for, but I also read in one of the threads here that S.Korea is phasing out its CDMA network anyway (as is Telstra here, the only CDMA provider in Australia btw) in favour of its 3.5G network. Also, I am finding it incredibly difficult to find anyone selling it online.
All the mobile phone companies here (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Hutchison/3) are madly launching 3G networks atm, what are my chances of a phone I buy here being compatible in S.Korea as well? Or would the Korean networks be too advanced? Should I then try going the other way, buying a phone compatible in Korea that would also work on the 3G networks here?
I am a little befuddled by all these acronyms and stuff (the whole WCDMA/CDMA being totally different things had me confused for AGES), and am not very familiar with the technical details of the networks in any of the 3 countries.
Any suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated.
I do a fair bit of travelling between South Korea, Italy and home (Australia). However I always hit trouble whenever it comes to phones working overseas. Italy is no problem - buy an Italian prepaid SIM card and use that. However Korea is a totally different proposition entirely - I have to buy a second-hand phone and use that. Unfortunately while calls work fine, things like SMS's never seem to work whenever I'm texting back home in Oz, they seem to disappear into the aether.
So in order to resolve this issue of having to have two phones (plus 2 SIM cards) on me all the time, I am after the following phone:It has to be compatible with (preferably advanced-level) networks in Australia, Italy (this shouldn't be too hard as they're both GSM-based) and South KoreaIt has to have sufficient multi-lingual support both in terms of reading AND writing messages in Korean, Italian and EnglishI'd prefer not to have a PDA if I can help itI did some research and came across the LG-KW9200 Worldphone which SEEMS to be what I'm looking for, but I also read in one of the threads here that S.Korea is phasing out its CDMA network anyway (as is Telstra here, the only CDMA provider in Australia btw) in favour of its 3.5G network. Also, I am finding it incredibly difficult to find anyone selling it online.
All the mobile phone companies here (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Hutchison/3) are madly launching 3G networks atm, what are my chances of a phone I buy here being compatible in S.Korea as well? Or would the Korean networks be too advanced? Should I then try going the other way, buying a phone compatible in Korea that would also work on the 3G networks here?
I am a little befuddled by all these acronyms and stuff (the whole WCDMA/CDMA being totally different things had me confused for AGES), and am not very familiar with the technical details of the networks in any of the 3 countries.
Any suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated.