When you Google "Han 701" or "Sam Taesung 8," you'll find absolutely nothing. Zero results. That's how secretive North Korean technology really is—and I just got my hands on two fully functional smuggled phones that reveal exactly what life is like for the average North Korean citizen.
These aren't museum pieces or props. These are real devices that real people use every single day in one of the world's most isolated countries. And what I found on them is equal parts fascinating and deeply unsettling.
Meet North Korea's Secret Smartphones
The first device is the Han 701—a budget North Korean phone that most people have never heard of. The second is the Sam Taesung 8 (literally "three huge stars"), which is North Korea's answer to Samsung's "three stars." Yes, that's the actual naming strategy.
The Sam Taesung 8 retails for nearly $1,000 in North Korea and was released in 2023. But here's the kicker: it looks exactly like a mid-range Huawei phone from 2021. Not "similar to"—I mean identical camera placement, identical body curves, even that distinctive Huawei-style button cutout with the red line through the power key.
When we traced the IMEI number, it pointed back to Chinese manufacturing. So either Huawei secretly supplied these phones to North Korea, or Sam Taesung just straight-up copied their homework. Given what else I found on these devices, I'm leaning heavily toward option two.
Autocorrect as Propaganda: Censorship in Real Time
Want to see government control taken to an extreme? Try typing on these phones.
Type "Namhan" (South Korea) and the moment you hit the space bar, it autocorrects to "puppet state." You literally cannot send the word "South Korea" even if you try. Type "Republic of Korea" and it gets turned into asterisks—like you're a kid trying to curse in Club Penguin.
But it gets wilder. The censorship is getting more invasive over time. The older Han phone lets you write "North Korea" normally. The newer Sam Taesung only allows "Joseon"—the traditional name for the Korean kingdom. South Korea becomes "South Joseon," as if they're just a rebellious province.
The Strangest Autocorrect Features You've Ever Seen
Daily NK News (the investigative outlet whose basement I filmed this from) discovered some truly bizarre software quirks:
- Type "Kim Jong-un" into any app and the text automatically becomes bold the second you finish typing
- South Korean slang gets subtly corrected to "proper" North Korean alternatives
- Type "oppa" (a common South Korean term meaning older brother or boyfriend) and it corrects to "comrade" with a warning: "This word can only be used to describe your siblings"
Imagine getting a government warning for attempting to type slang. That's not just censorship—that's linguistic control on a level I've genuinely never seen before.
The Internet That Isn't Really the Internet
Here's where things get really dystopian. Both phones have Wi-Fi icons in their quick settings. But press them and absolutely nothing happens. On the newer Sam Taesung, the Wi-Fi icon has been removed entirely from the control panel—as if they don't want you to even consider that such a feature could exist.
The only way to get online is through something called "Miru," and it requires:
- Your government ID
- An authenticated North Korean physical SIM card
- So many personal details that everything you do can be traced directly back to you
And even with all that? You're not getting on the actual internet. You're accessing a highly curated North Korean intranet—basically a walled garden of government-approved content, propaganda, and apps.
The connection speeds? Between 2 and 33 megabits per second. That's less than one-fourteenth of what South Koreans get on public Wi-Fi. It's 2025 technology performing like it's 2010.
Hardware from Another Era
The Sam Taesung 8 is supposedly a flagship phone released in 2023 for nearly $1,000. But using it feels like stepping back in time.
The cameras are terrible. The Han phone produces grainy, poor-quality images across the board. Despite having three rear cameras, there's no ultrawide and no zoom—just useless macro and depth sensors. That's a trend that died globally after 2020, yet here it is in a 2023 release.
The Sam Taesung's camera is so buggy we couldn't even get it to flip to the rear cameras. And it has this bizarre watermark plastered over photos that says "Please contact Hinatron"—a small Chinese company that makes smartphone parts. It looks like they supplied components but North Korea just... never paid the license fee?
The software is ancient. The Han runs Android 10 with no ability to update. The Sam Taesung is stuck on Android 11—making them 5 years behind current Android versions.
There's almost no competitive pressure in this market. No incentive to innovate. If anything, keeping the tech dated makes it simpler and easier to control.
Copied Content Everywhere You Look
At least 50% of the icons on these phones are stolen from other companies:
- File Manager and Compass icons are reskinned Huawei designs
- Maps is a near-perfect copy of the Google Maps icon
- There's an app with the Microsoft Word logo that opens to Excel, PowerPoint, and Word—except these definitely aren't Microsoft apps
- The official Sam Taesung wallpaper appears to be downloaded from an Honor phone with an "8" added to it
- The "About Phone" image is literally stripped from Huawei Mate 30 Pro promotional material
Even the content library is pirated. There's an "informational video" about Arsenal Football Club that looks professionally produced—because it's ripped straight from an Amazon Prime series. They just changed the title from "Stay in the Game" to "Sweat for the Win" and slapped a North Korean company logo across it.
This is despite literal sanctions preventing US companies like Amazon from collaborating with North Korea.
The Fascinating World of North Korean Apps
These phones come with an absurd number of pre-installed apps. Like, have you ever seen this many apps come pre-loaded on a smartphone?
There's actually some surprisingly advanced functionality:
- A medicine delivery app for ordering prescriptions
- Maps with navigation (though it won't show the border with South Korea and won't let you zoom out beyond the country)
- An e-commerce store where you can buy smartwatches and TVs using an electronic wallet
- Online gambling with sports betting options
- A hefty catalog of downloadable video content
Content Curated by Ideology
The movie selection tells you everything about government priorities. I couldn't find a single film from the US or South Korea. But Russian movies? Loads of them. That makes perfect sense—Russia is one of North Korea's closest political allies.
There's also a surprising number of Indian movies, including "Three Idiots" (which I've actually seen). The theory from Daily NK is that Indian culture hits a sweet spot: exotic and interesting enough to seem like worldly content, but different enough from Western culture that it doesn't pose a threat to North Korean ideology.
Apps That Serve the Regime
Then there are apps that feel directly requested by the government:
- Biographies app: Entirely devoted to past and current North Korean rulers
- General Guidance app: Split into laws, regulations, legal dictionary, and "common sense"—literally teaching people things like "Can relatives marry?" and "How should we legally understand the family?"
- Cooking app: Guides you through traditional North Korean cuisine only
Every official app opens by showing you a famous quote from one of the country's leaders. It feels like something from a dystopian video game loading screen, except this is real life.
The Game That Erases Asians
There's a football game called "International Soccer League 2.0" that opens with a screenshot of Messi's face—except that image is actually stolen from Japanese game Pro Evolution Soccer.
Here's the fascinating part: You can select Tottenham Hotspur with the correct 2022 roster, except Son Heung-min—the team's only South Korean player—has been completely removed. They just chopped him out.
Why? Presumably to prevent North Koreans from seeing that South Koreans have successful international athletic careers.
The App Store That Requires Physical Visits
Getting new apps isn't like downloading from Google Play or the App Store. North Korea has an app store, but here's the catch: you can't open downloaded apps until you take your phone to an in-person store where officials will authorize them and download the necessary backend data.
And there's an extra twist: Your apps expire.
I saw one app asking if I wanted to pay for 6 months or 12 months (with a discount) to keep using it. Effectively making every app a paid subscription—even the "Laws of North Korea" app.
Remember, North Korea's national income per person is just 3.4% of South Korea's. For most citizens, maintaining a library of apps is probably an unaffordable luxury.
Red Flag: The Surveillance You Can't Escape
Even if you found ways around the authorization system or app expiration (you can temporarily bypass it by changing your phone's date), there's a crucial reason you wouldn't dare try this in North Korea.
It's called Red Flag.
Red Flag is surveillance software baked into the lowest level of Android on these phones, making it almost untraceable and impenetrable. It blocks developer settings (normally unlocked by tapping "Build Number" multiple times), preventing you from seeing what's happening behind the scenes.
How Red Flag Works
Every file, app, and photo on these phones has a digital signature showing where it originated. Red Flag ensures only files with either:
- North Korean government signatures, or
- Self-signatures (like photos from your camera)
...can be opened. Anything else gets automatically deleted.
People have tried workarounds—opening foreign files through web browsers, using SD cards with outside content—but Red Flag's deep system integration catches them.
The Feature That Makes Your Blood Run Cold
Both phones take periodic screenshots as you're using them. You don't see them being taken, but you can view the folder where they're stored.
While filming this, I could see the phone had taken screenshots that very day during my recording session. The frequency varies, but it's many times per day.
The worst part? You can look at the folder but you can't open the screenshots. You can't check them. You can't delete them.
Whether these are continuously sent to the government or used when officials already suspect you is anyone's guess. But would you risk it in a country where watching South Korean entertainment is punishable by death?
Since 2020, North Korea has had laws stating that distributing or even just watching South Korean content can result in execution. People who distribute this content are tried alongside drug criminals—it's considered the same tier of offense.
What This All Really Means
Every part of these devices—from autocorrect to app stores to secret screenshots—is designed to reinforce a single narrative:
North Korea is superior. Foreign influence is dangerous. Everything you do is being watched.
It's not just about limiting access to information. It's about shaping reality itself through technology. When you can't even type certain words, when your leader's name automatically appears in bold, when apps expire and require government authorization, when your phone secretly photographs your screen—that's not just surveillance. That's total information control.
The contrast is stark: In North Korea, it takes an hour to visit a physical store to install a single app. In the rest of the world, I can buy an entire international data plan in 20 seconds from my couch.
The Bigger Picture
These phones reveal something profound about how authoritarian regimes use technology. We often think of the internet as this inherently liberating force—and it can be. But North Korea has shown that the same technology can be weaponized for unprecedented control.
They've created a closed ecosystem where:
- Language itself is regulated in real-time
- Access to information is filtered through ideological lenses
- Entertainment options are curated to reinforce approved alliances
- Every digital action leaves a traceable, deletable footprint
- The concept of privacy doesn't exist
And perhaps most effectively—they've convinced their citizens this is normal. When you've never known different, when your phone has always required government authorization, when South Korea has always autocorrected to "puppet state," that becomes your reality.
Final Thoughts
Getting access to these phones—the Han 701 and Sam Taesung 8—has been like looking through a window into a parallel technological universe. One where smartphones don't connect you to the world, but instead trap you more thoroughly in your government's chosen narrative.
It makes me profoundly grateful for the technological freedom most of us take for granted. The ability to download any app instantly. To search for any information. To communicate freely without autocorrect changing our words to propaganda.
These aren't just phones. They're instruments of control disguised as modern technology. And that might be the most unsettling discovery of all.
What aspect of North Korean technology surveillance surprised you most? Share your thoughts in the comments below. And if you found this deep dive valuable, consider sharing it—most people have no idea these devices even exist.