Watch, listen, snap and call

Every time Shin Jae-soon, a 36-year-old employee at a shipping company, goes out with his family he faces the same quandary: Should he take the digital camera or the camcorder? “Of course, I want to get pictures of my three-year-old daughter on my digital camera and my camcorder but the two gadgets are too unwieldy to carry around,” Mr. Shin said. Fortunately for Mr. Shin, the growing convergence among consumer electronics goods means that very soon he should be relieved of this taxing decision. Through new, multi-purpose devices, the era when you used your phone merely to call someone, or your MP3 player just to listen to tunes, is fast being consigned to history. Next month, Samsung Electronics Co. is launching a camcorder that not only has a 5-million-pixel digital camera and MP3 player, but can also handle digital multimedia broadcasting services. Apple Computer Inc. is releasing a video-enabled iPod next month, which aside from playing music, displays color photos, has a personal organizer and contact book and even plays home movies and TV shows. Meanwhile, Sony’s new PSP game console, not content with just letting you play games, also shows videos, plays music and has wireless Internet access. “Today’s digital generation hates lugging separate portable devices around,” said Yoo Byoung-youl, an executive director of Samsung Electronics’ digital video division. Mr. Yoo’s words illustrate that with cutting edge functions now taken for granted, consumers are demanding their gadgets be ever more user-friendly. Another important factor in the “digital convergence” trend is the rapidly increasing capacities of batteries and memory chips. For instance, the lithium ion battery, commonly used in portable gadgets, has narrowed to three millimeters from 10 millimeters in the last few years, but its duration has jumped about 50 percent, according to LG Chem Ltd.’s Battery Research Center. “The focus of the information technology industry is already shifting from digital convergence to making products more mobile,” Mr. Yoo of Samsung said. “It is only a matter of time before we see a product that combines a mobile phone with a digital camera and an MP3 player,” said Bang Il-seok, president of Olympus Korea. “The remaining issue is who is going to take the lead among the producers of those items.” by Chang Chung-hoon