One of the surprises in North Korea’s recently-launched Samjiyon (삼지연) tablet was the inclusion of Angry Birds, the globally-popular game that involves shooting animated birds to destroy structures and animated pigs. In July, when I was reviewing the Samjiyon, I contacted game-maker Rovio to ask about its inclusion in the device. Despite several attempts to get comment,…

 

A model of North Korea’s Samjiyon (삼지연) tablet is up for sale on Ebay. It appeared on the morning on Thursday, November 7, and appears to have been listed by a Canadian account with a shipping location of Yanji in China. Yanji sits just across the border from North Korea. Its appearance followed a second-round of…

 

One of the most interesting questions surrounding North Korea’s Samjiyon tablet is its source. State media reports not withstanding, the tablet is almost certainly not made in North Korea — the country just doesn’t have the electronics manufacturing capability to design products like tablet computers from the components up. And anyway, why bother? Companies in Taiwan…

 

North Korea, like the rest of the world, is getting hooked on tablet computers. In the last year, state media has highlighted three different tablet computers that are now, according to the reports, available in the country. The latest of these, the Samjiyon (삼지연), is also on sale to foreigners and one of the tablets…

 

North Korea’s main evening news featured a minute-long report on the tablet computers on Thursday night. The report, which focused on the Samjiyon tablet, interviewed a man identified as the chief engineer of the tablet from the Multimedia Technology Research Institute of the Korea Computer Center. The tablet first made an appearance in September at…