I recently visited Seoul, South Korea and was a bit surprised to learn before traveling that UK mobile phones would not work in this country. As an owner of an iPhone 3G i thought that it was bound to work, however on searching the internet there are some conflicting views about this (for/ against) since the iPhone 3G is not on sale in this market.

My experience - the iPhone 3G worked absolutely fine. It picks up a network and can make calls and send SMS’s no problem. I did not turn on data roaming as i’m sure this is expensive, however, since Seoul (and also Cheongju to an extent) is full of free public WiFi the iPhone actually works better here than it does in London. So if you want to use it to email/ upload photos, browse the net etc it works like a dream….

Also the Truphone application works really, really well over WiFi and the call quality is as good as the cellular network so this is relatively inexpensive way to keep in touch with people by phone. I also tried Fring, however, the call quality of this was a bit patchy by comparison (for Fring to Skype calls)

Only problem seems to be with Google Maps which do not seem to exist for South Korea. This would have been really handy since very few people speak English and trying to work out where you are/ get a taxi driver to drop you off in the right place was a bit of a headache. For some reason these are not available - if anyone can shed any light please post here!