Would You Buy the Samjiyon Made-in-North Korea Android Tablet? (VIDEOS)
South Korea may have produced two tech giants in Samsung and LG, but North Korea appears to be playing catch up in this department.
YouTube/awsumist
The state-run Korea Computer Centre (KCC) rolled out in 2012 the Samjiyon tablet, which the South China Morning Post said could be better than the iPad in some ways.
The device costs HK$1,920 and runs on a modified version of Android. Its components were possibly assembled in North Korea, but could have been manufactured in china by the Yecon Industry Company in Shenzhen.
It includes advertisement-free content pre-loaded - one of its advantages compared to the iPad which needs to be filled with apps bought from the Apple store.
YouTube/Martyn Williams
Samjiyon also has 141 e-books, but its topics are mostly about North Korea. To help the user, the device contains 448 pre-installed dictionaries. It also features a localised version of popular mobile games such as Angry Birds Rio.
Coming from a communist country, it should not surprise users that the Samjiyon cannot access the Internet, but it has an option to access North Korea's domestic and heavily censored public intranet, the Kwangmyong.
University of Vienna professor Ruediger Frank, in a commentary at 38 North, pointed out that the tablet was made for people who would mainly buy it for offline uses and for those who want to know more about the closed country since the date in the table centre on information about the nation's ideology, history and its leader, Kim Il-sung.
"The existence of this tablet does not in any way change the fact that [North Korea] is, for many of its people, a country of hard manual labour and simple living conditions ... [The Samjiyon] is a useful and entertaining device for a minority in a totalitarian system with a dominant ideology," Mr Frank wrote.
But Koryo Tours, a travel agency based in Beijing, China, that organises tours to North Korea, observed that interest in tech products of North Korea is low among foreign tourists. When they took some tour groups to visit the KCC factory, many of the tourists expressed preference to see instead historical sites. At souvenir shops, art works were more sellable than made-in-North Korea computing devices.
