MOSCOW, August 12 (RIA Novosti) - North Korea has showcased what it claims is the country’s first smartphone, media reports said Monday.
The phone, called Arirang after a North Korean folk song, was demonstrated to the nation’s leader Kim Jong-Un over the weekend when he visited a Pyongyang factory where the cellphones are made, the Korean Central News Agency KCNA said.
No details were available about the phone’s specifications, but photos of it suggest it runs on the Android operating system. According to some reports, it is controlled by a touchscreen and its camera is said to have “high pixels”.
KCNA said the factory started producing the phones “a few days ago” and that they “are high in demand among the people.”
The agency quoted Kim as saying he highly appreciated “the creative ingenuity and patriotic enthusiasm with which the officials and employees of the factory laid a solid foundation for mass-producing hand phones by building a new modern hand phone production process.”
According to some estimates, about 1.5 million people currently use mobile phone services in the nation of 24.5 million.
North Korea unveiled a tablet computer last year, the New York Times reported, although Internet access requires permission from the government, which tightly controls access.
