SEOUL, South Korea — Ha Mok-min is feeling like a gunslinger these days. At the English-language cram school she attends during the winter break, students jealous of her international bragging rights line up to duel with her.
“They come with their cellphones boasting they can beat me,” said Ha, 16, her deadpan manner lending her the air of a champion accustomed to — even weary of — fame. “I let them try.”
She and another young South Korean, Bae Yeong-ho, recently conquered the world with their thumbs. Their Team Korea won an international competition held in New York this month to determine who can send text messages the fastest — and most accurately — on a cellphone.
“When others watch me texting, they think I’m not that fast and they can do better,” said Bae, 17, a high school dropout who dyes his hair a light chestnut color and is studying to be an opera singer. “So far, I’ve never lost a match.”
In the New York competition he typed six characters a second. “If I can think faster I can type faster,” he said.
The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits.
To ensure a level playing field, LG handed out identical mobile phones — one with a numeric keypad and the other with a keyboardlike QWERTY pad — weeks in advance for practice. The basic rule of the competition: copy phrases streaming across a monitor correctly, with the required capitalization and punctuation, as quickly as possible. Whichever language players chose, words were selected so that each would type the same number of characters.
Then they went thumb to lightning thumb, in five battles with names like “The Monsters’ Swamp” and “Race of Death.”
When it was over, Ha and Bae were proclaimed the world’s fastest texters. An American team came in second, an Argentine team was third.
Since their return home with $50,000 in prize money each, Ha and Bae have become something approaching heroes to what Koreans call the “thumb tribe” — youngsters who feel more comfortable texting than talking.
Until his recent immersion in music studies, Bae texted 200 to 300 messages a day. Ha averages 150 to 200.
“That’s average among my friends,” she said defensively, glancing at her mother sitting nearby. “Some send as many as 500 a day.”
In 2009, Ha won the South Korean national title against 2.8 million competitors by thumbing 7.25 characters a second. (The best score among participants in their 40s was 2.2 characters a second.) Mr. Bae, who was the 2008 national champion and has typed as many as 8 characters a second, did not compete last year.
“I text while walking, eating, watching TV,” Ha said.
During the interview, even though she was not holding her cellphone, she sat with her thumbs facing each other like a crab’s claws, as if ready to alight on an imaginary keypad.
“At school, we look and listen to the teacher while texting on our cellphones under our desks or in our pockets,” she said. “No typos.”
That behavior has gotten Ha, Bae and numerous other teenagers around the world into trouble, with angry teachers confiscating their cellphones. But Ms. Ha’s international victory has more than compensated for all that.
Ha is an almost accidental champion. Last October, she and her friends were walking through the Coex Mall, a youth hub in southern Seoul, when they saw an LG kiosk about the national competition that was under way. She entered, hoping to get free movie tickets and other gift coupons. She ended up with the top prize: $17,000.
Bae was more calculating. “When I saw the 2008 competition announced on the Internet, I said, This is it,” he said. “It was about time that someone organized something like this. I wanted to make money and buy a car.” (NYT)
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