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New Songdo: City of the Future
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Even without flying cars and cold fusion, we were really just starting to let ourselves get acquainted with the idea of living in the future with our 3G and OQOs and what have you - then boom, the South Korean reality check comes and bursts our bubble yet again. Seems they're whipping up a brand new metropolis called New Songdo, a 'ubiquitous city' being built 40 miles outside Seoul, which, like the world's largest gadget, will serve as one of the largest integrated technology testbeds ever conceived. Billed as the next stage of development for technology-enabled living, New Songo will equipped with a $297 million RFID research center when completed in 2014, and its 65,000 residents will all have homes with electronic locks, integrated videoconferencing, VoD, and unified systems and services down to details like each resident having a non-identity linked smartcard that transacts purchases, grants entry to mass transit, parking, and opens your front door at the end of the day. There are some seriously high hopes for the $25 billion project, of course, but we've still got another nine years until they've wrapped up their spankin' new city to see exactly how obsolete this now-futuristic lifestyle setup will really seem.
One think they sure know how to do: phones: the unfortunately named BM-200 smartphone saves face with Windows Mobile 5.0, WiFi and CDMA, Bluetooth, up to 512MB ROM with miniSD expansion, MP3 player, and 2 megapixel camera with flash. It also sports a 2.8-inch, 240x320 pixel LCD in an oh so sleek 2.4 x 4.8 x 0.7-inches — that's awholehellofalotof tech goodness stuffed into a box a fraction of an inch wider than the 60GB iPod. It's so small, in fact, that our desire to pull the device tight to our bosom in a sweaty post-wheat-field-running embrace-at-dawn may never come true. |
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