iPhone 4S “Uncompetitive” in South Korea As Sales Fall

Now this one is an interesting bit of news, considering the fact that iPhone 4S has sold almost 4 million handset in its first weekend despite being launched in only 7 major markets.

Apparently the handset is being looked at as uncompetitive in the South Korean markets as the customers feel that the iPhone 4S is lacking in features and doesn’t have anything new to offer. As a result the sales of the Apple device have slowed down in South Korea with a lot of customers even cancelling pre-orders as well.

As per reports from The Korea Times around 150,000 to 300,000 combined handset units were pre ordered with SK Telecom and Korea Telecom. And now many of them are being either returned or the pre orders are being cancelled by the customers citing varied reasons.

One of the prominent reasons seems to be the lack of 4G LTE technology in the iPhone. The 4G LTE network has been introduced in South Korea recently and the carriers are pushing it very aggressively with highly subsidized handsets. And hence people are switching to the LTE networks thus giving up on their iPhone 4S.

The other prominent reason is the fact that Siri doesn’t support the Korean language which makes the iPhone 4S almost similar to the iPhone 4 and hence people here do not see any value in making the jump and pay such a high price for the handset.

Although the iPhone 4S boasts of a highly functional 8MP camera, it doesn’t seem to be an important feature for the South Koreans. It will be interesting to see how the carriers and Apple deal with this particular issue in South Korea.

We will keep our eyes on this one and update you as soon as we hear anything on the same.