Features of the phone that are typically found on smartphones worldwide were hijacked and used to disseminate propaganda. For example, auto-correct is something that just about everyone with a smartphone has had to deal with. On the North Korean phone, “South Korea” was auto-corrected to “puppet state.” The word “oppa,”which means older brother in North Korea but is slang in South Korea for a boyfriend, was auto-corrected to “Comrade.” The latter has a more Communist feel to the word. If the word “oppa” were used, a warning would flash across the screen reminding North Koreans that “oppa” was to be used only to refer to an older sibling.
Martyn Williams, an expert in North Korean technology and an information senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center said, “Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people.” The phone’s auto-correct is following rules put in place by North Korea leader Kim Jong Un who made it a state crime in 2023 to use South Korean phrases or to speak in a South Korean accent.
Smartphone smuggled out of North Korea. | Image credit-BBC
If your phone started taking a screenshot every five minutes, you’d assume that malware had been installed by accident on your handset. But the North Korean phone did this by design and these screenshots were hidden in a secret folder that the user could not open. We’d assume that members of the North Korean government would be able to access those images taken by the phone.
Not much is known about the smartphone that was smuggled out of North Korea but it does have a curved screen and a punch-hole front-facing camera. The phone resembles an Android handset and in fact, it uses a modified version of the platform. It is built using components imported from China and Taiwan. Typical screen sizes for North Korean phones run from 4.7 inches to 6+ inches on newer models.
These phones sport 2GB, 3GB, or 4GB RAM with 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of internal storage. Rear cameras usually have 8MP to 13MP image sensors with 5MP to 8MP sensors used on front-facing cameras. They also feature microSD slots which are a big deal because music, films, and television shows from South Korea are smuggled into North Korea on microSD cards that can be played on phones available in the country. Smartphone brands in North Korea include Arirang and Pyongyang.
