What I Learned in Korea
About eSIMs, AirTags and more
Hello!
I am back from South Korea and as promised I bring stories. But first, pictures! We start with the tiny museum in Gamcheon, an arts district in Busan. Yes, my friends old cell phones and “Beepers” are now the thing of museums. Zoom in and read the descriptions if you can. They are accurate but so odd to see applied to something seemingly so recent to someone my age.
And in an exhibit showing different kinds of paper money there is also the “phone card.”
Gamcheon also had a little public art displays hidden around the district. This one showed the mundanity of daily life by creating hands at a keyboard. Too real.
We went to an immersive exhibit for Netflix’s “Alchemy of Souls.” (OK technically TVn’s, but we watched it on Netflix.) You got a card with a QR code that let you unlock various things like immersive selfies that then got displayed on the wall behind you.
Pictures can’t really do it justice but look at these and imagine it in 3D.
Eileen bought a purse in a store with no people, called Bonnie’s. You just pick up the purse, scan it and pay. CCTV is always watching to make sure you pay.
Of course, I love to capture error screens. This one was in LAX on our way out.
Now, if you want more you can find a lot more, including the incredible cafes and such we went to on my Instagram account, acedtect.
ESIMS
I’ve talked about this a couple other places so apologies if you already heard the spiel. But I can’t say enough about how easy dual eSIMs made the trip. An eSIM is just the same thing as a SIM card, but without needing the card. It has all the configuration data you need to access a telephone network. But instead of popping a card in and out, you just scan a QR code and download the “SIM.”
Because many current phones have dual eSIM, you can then run two carriers at once. for us, this meant keeping our T-Mobile line active so we could get calls and texts to our normal US number. But making a temporary Korean eSIM the “primary” so our data all went through that, instead of counting against our T-Mobile romaing allowance.
It also let us have a Korean phone number, which was handy on a few occasions, like signing up for restaurant wait lists that would text you when your table was ready.
We chose LGU+ to get our eSIM from because reviews said they had one of the fastest networks with the most widespread 5G coverage, which we found to be true. We set it up at the airport and it was FAST. It took less than ten minutes and that was for two phones. If we hadn’t wanted the ability to make calls and texts from a korean number we wouldn’t have even needed to visit the Kiosk, just get a QR code by email. But to get a Korean umber you needed a passport.
Unlimited data for 15 days (our trip was 14 days) was around $50 and it was about $5 to add on text messages and 200 minutes of calls. You could always top that off if you ran out but we didn’t.
After setup, we had to go into settings and turn on our US number since they had turned it off to test that everything was working. With both lines on you then told the phone which you wanted to use most of the time. I also set mine to keep using the number a conversation started with. That way when friends and family texted me I wouldn’t be texting back with a strange Korean number.
I also had to reassociate Apple’s iMessage with the proper phone number to get blue bubbles and uncompressed photos for those numbers. It did a weird thing where all of my contacts labels disappered. That meant I had to figure out who’s messages were who’s from context. But once we were back home and I deleted the Korean eSIM, it all went back to normal.
For the firtst time on an international trip I wasn’t concerned with my data usage every minute of the day and scrambling to get on sketchy WiFi. Loved this experience.
About Air Tags
So Apple does not have approval to operate its UltraWideband network in South Korea. Ths could be because of pressure from Samsung or security concerns or both. So I wasn’t able to test Air Tags in my luggage until we got back to LAX. However it was useful there. I saw the bag out by the gate meaning it was still on the plane, so I wasn’t constantly looking for it on the baggage carousel. Then when it jumped to my location I knew it had made it on the truck and was aboutto be unloaed. And a few minutes later it came tumbling down the converyor belt.
Any Questions?
I had a lovely time and could go on and on, but I’ll leave it to you to let me know what else you want to hear about. Email me or comment on Substack. I’ll answer you directly, but if I get enough of the same question I’ll add it to a followup edition of the newsletter.
And HUGE thanks for supporting the staff at DTNS while I was gone. Sarah, Joe, Roger adn the team did a fantastic job keepign things going as if there was nothing unusual. Well done!
Thanks all!!!!
Tom