To get a glimpse of the future of mobile telecommunications, a good place to start, I’ve often heard, is South Korea.

One of the world’s most advanced technological countries, South Korea is home to a startling number of new mobile handset launches each year, developed by homegrown rivals LG Electronics and Samsung. The products are usually introduced in the home market first and then a few months later the handsets are shipped west and east to consumers in North America and Europe.

So I’ve come to Seoul this week to see what we in Europe can expect in the coming months from a mobile sector that is about to enjoy another record-breaking year. Analysts estimate handset makers will sell more than one billion new units this year around the world, fuelled primarily by demand in the developing world for basic models.

In the more mature markets, the sophistication marches on. But I must caution there really are very few brand new features on the horizon for the final months of 2007. Despite all the iPhone hype, 2007 will not usher in any real technological breakthroughs in handset design. The big advancements – mobile TV, Wifi-ready handsets and broadband-speed Net access, to name but a few – have been with us for the past 18 months. In a nod to 90s-era PDAs, touch-tone screens became more popular this year (I’m thinking of the LG-Prada co-branded phone, followed by the Apple iPhone), but that really doesn’t count as innovation.

And so, the models to be introduced in the next six months or so can be best classified as improvements on last year’s model – think more processing power, more memory, faster net browsing and built-in cameras that pack more pixels. Well into 2008 and beyond, things will get more interesting.

Based on what I’ve seen this week in Korea after a series of meeting with handset makers, here’s what we can expect to see at our local mobile shops beginning this Christmas:

1. Despite the underwhelming consumer response so far, mobile TV phones will continue to flood the market. Before you groan, check them out. The picture quality improves with each generation. The image is now crisp enough to follow most programming, though trying to pick up a tiny tennis ball during a frenzied volley is still an impossibility. I expect we will continue to see mobile TV handsets hit the market for years to come, even if the regulatory snares and lack of broadcast spectrum reduce the operators’ programming to pirate-TV quality fare. And with it, comes a new set of transmission technology acronyms we’ll have to become familiar with including DMB, DVBH and Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO.

2. Serious camera phones. At some point, handset makers are going to have to rename these handsets as we’ve reached a true tipping point. Future models seem to be digital cameras first that happen to double as a phone. Samsung has a number of mega-megapixel models in the line-up, including a chunky 10-megapixel model with 3X zoom lens.

3. Following the success of LG’s Prada series and Apple’s iPhone, expect more touch-screen phones to hit the market that operate with either a stylus or the always handy pointer finger. This is an inevitable development as phone memory increases to the point where phones become all-in-one PDA organisers. Tapping the screen to find your contacts folder just feels much more like a serious mobile organiser. Plus, new models such as LG’s upcoming K520 (on sale in Europe later this month) enable you to tap the screen a few times to pull up a display of either a QWERTY or normal handset keyboard. Nice touch.

4. Remember this acronym: HSUPA. The only letter worth translating here is “U” for “upload”, allowing users to publish to the net, for example, sizeable files at data speeds of up to 1.8 megabits/second. In other words, true on-the-go publishing capabilities, enabling mobile bloggers to post photos and videos to their web site while they are out and about. There should be some interesting citizen reportage occurring once the HSUPA phones hit the market in early 2008.

5. I’m not so sure about this last one. I’ve seen a number of phones this week with a built-in RFID reader. The RFID reader essentially turns handsets into scanners that would enable customers to, say, swipe milk cartons with the phone to learn which farm produced the milk. SK Telecom demoed a service in Seoul where its customers can run their phone along the door of a taxi cab to get details on the driver’s safety record before getting in. Some 80,000 cabs in Seoul are equipped with this function. It’s being billed as late-night peace of mind. Of course, finding a cab late at night in any city is cause enough for celebration. Whether he gets me home in one piece is a bonus. More practical, verging on futuristic, is using reader chips to turn mobiles into digital wallets to pay for soda cans from specially equipped vending machines or take money out of a cash point with a swipe, and a few personal details.

With all this development, you may be looking at your beaten-up mobile right now and thinking, I can probably hold out until the models are a bit cheaper and pack more features. That’s how I usually play it.

I was startled, however, to learn from a Samsung sales rep in Seoul that it is not uncommon in South Korea for a consumer to buy a new mobile every six months. And because subsidies are still rare in South Korea, consumers usually are paying few hundred pounds per handset, a sizeable sum in a country where the GDP per capita is about £12,000.

But this replacement frenzy that has it rewards. There are, quite simply, some really cool handsets here.