1991 was a time when South Korea was poised to become a Worldly i.T.Power . early telecommunication companies gave-out network machines in a simple block of black-and-white monitor and keyboard put together, much like minitel distributed in France a decade earlier . this is when a handful of SamSung Electronics employees quite to form a company producing mobile music players, starting with CD . the rest of the decade saw the whole nation burning music to replay on-the-go .
just at the time when Koreans found local electronics companies can make cuter, fun devices thus migrating from Motorola and Sanya to SamSung and Sky, iRiver offered such intriguingly-designed, fun-to-operate memory-based mp3 players with the dawn of the Millennium . there was a vacuum as Apple’s iPod introduced in 2001 held it back with Mac-only compatibility for a good three years . it was so cool to show-off an iRiver . successful, the company speared onto hard-disk players and sprung onto other mobile categories such as electronic dictionaries and even GPS navigation sets . then ofcourse a few of its founding members quit to find competing aTree .
but eventually with price competition from conglomerates and iPhones then all the smart-phones in the World it gradually faded from users’ memory .
South Korea’s second telecommunication conglomerate SK Telecom announced its purchase today, and they may be interested in export routes iRiver had while riding on Global popularity .
– Korea Tech BLog –
