South Koreans top texters
Speed, accuracy determine champs, with U.S. team second
NEW YORK – Two South Korean teenagers have been crowned fastest texters in the world.
The team of 17-year-old Bae Yeong Ho and 18-year-old Ha Mok Min went thumb-to-thumb against competitors from a dozen countries to win the title in a competition Thursday in New York City.
The LG Mobile World Cup challenged nimble-fingered youths on both speed and accuracy. The winning team took home a $100,000 prize.
Second place and $20,000 went to the U.S. contestants – 16-year-old Kate Moore, of Des Moines, Iowa, who is the 2009 U.S. National Texting Champion, and 14-year-old Morgan Dynda, of Pooler, Ga., the 2009 runner-up. An Argentinian team came in third and the Brazilians took fourth.
With many languages at play, English was the texting language of the U.S. competitors and those from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Other nations represented were Indonesia, Portugal, Russia, Mexico and Spain.
The drill of the third annual Mobile World Cup was simple: copying words and phrases in one’s native language off a monitor correctly, with no typos or abbreviations, and as fast as possible with the required capitalization and punctuation. Some words were intentionally misspelled to test alertness.
The event is sponsored by LG Electronics Inc.’s mobile-phone division, a company based in Seoul, South Korea.