It’s been a while since we last saw a Samjiyon tablet
North Korea has earned its reputation as a hermit kingdom with limited external support coming from a handful of allies. Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has paid dearly for setting up a 3G network in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But despite global-scale restrictions, the country has managed to make smartphones and tablets for its citizens to use, albeit with incredibly limited functionality. One such device is the Samjiyon tablet, believed to be developed by the Korea Computer Center and first revealed in 2012, right around the time the Google Nexus 7 was making waves. This mostly forgotten tablet has now resurfaced courtesy of a group of developers who purchased it from a previous owner.
The people at vx-underground, who claim to own the largest collection of malware materials in the world, said on Twitter that they tracked down a Samjiyon tablet at some sort of auction and made a successful bid for it. The device is said to have never been used and is in “mint-condition,” though it’s hard to tell given if this is actually the case given that a decade has passed by from its manufacture.
As reviewed by North Korea Tech, the Samjiyon tablet features a 7″ 1024 x 768 display backed by a 1.2 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and the option for 8GB or 16GB of storage. There’s also a 2MP camera for good measure.
On the software side of things, the Samjiyon tablet is noted to run on Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich — certainly modern for its time, but a relic of the past now. As you would expect, the tablet lacks any internet connectivity whatsoever, relying instead on DPRK’s intranet network. Moreover, there are no Google apps on board, but it comes with a few pre-installed apps, as shown in the screenshots below published by North Korea Tech.
Visitors to North Korea were able to purchase the tablet for a time until June of 2014, NK News reported. Another North Korea Tech article tracked a Samjiyon selling on eBay back in November of 2013 for $546.
North Korea has been historically skeptical about foreign technology. In 2016, the regime infamously asked its athletes to decline the Olympic Edition Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, units of which were being handed out to athletes as a gift during the Summer Games. However, this hasn’t stopped the country from churning out smartphones. You can have a look at some of the country’s smartphone releases over the decade in our deep dive.
Meanwhile, vx-underground hasn’t made it clear on what it plans on doing with the tablet, though some observers have suggested a code dump among other things.
