Hands-on shows North Korean smartphone

A rare hands-on of a North Korean smartphone has emerged. The Arirang 151 runs on a heavily modified version of Android 4.4.2, which allows the government to monitor use of the device and prevents users from setting up an internet connection.

The Arirang 151 has a 5″ screen with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels and presumably runs on an older MediaTek processor. The baseband points to a MediaTek MT6582, a quad-core with four Cortex A7 processor cores at 1.4GHz with Mali 400MP2 GPU. It is probably a Chinese smartphone whose firmware has been modified by the North Korean government.

The smartphone came into the hands of Danish developer Christian Budde Christensen during a recent trip to North Korea. He won’t say how he got the smartphone, presumably so as not to get in trouble for whoever gave it. He writes about his experiences in a post on Medium.

It is possible to transfer files to the device from a PC, but they will not open and will probably disappear. Previous North Korean devices were found to have protection against opening files that were not created on the device itself.

The device with 4GB of storage features an introductory video of the phone with a size of 500MB, which Christensen has uploaded to YouTube. The smartphone has no Wi-Fi and if users insert a SIM card that is not from a North Korean carrier, it turns off. Christensen also reports that he has seen fitness trackers on North Koreans.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal published a video report on North Korean technology. It shows that North Koreans are slowly realizing that the government is using smartphones to monitor the population and a woman who recently fled the country says that more and more people left their phones in an empty room when they said negative things about it. the regime wanted to say.

North Korea currently has a totalitarian regime led by Kim Jong-un. The country is very closed, but despite this, information about technology in the country occasionally comes out. For example, a state-owned company presented an iPad last year and the Fedora-based Red Star OS can also be installed outside of North Korea.