Name: We Tested a Smartphone Smuggled From North Korea
Uploaded: 2026-08-28T17:40:00Z
Duration: 5 min 2 s
Description: Watch WSJ’s Dasl Yoon explore a North Korean smartphone that looks familiar at first glance, until she reveals some more sinister features.

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Watch WSJ’s Dasl Yoon explore a North Korean smartphone that looks familiar at first glance, until she reveals some more sinister features. Photo: Matilda Aquila Chia

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260827/ddd458b5-bf86-4c9e-8014-0bcbe04b2e68/3/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Watch WSJ’s Dasl Yoon explore a North Korean smartphone that looks familiar at first glance, until she reveals some more sinister features.

We Tested a Smartphone Smuggled From North Korea

This looks like an unremarkable Android phone, but it's far from average. It's been smuggled out in 2023 from one of the most closed off nations in the world: North Korea. Daily NK, a Seoul-based news organization that reports on North Korea, gave us rare access to the device. But start using it, and some interesting quirks emerge. The Happy New Year Song. So this phone is called the Haeyang 701, and it's a mid-tier North Korean smartphone that was produced in 2023. This phone has everything you would expect from a smartphone, including voice calls, text messages, and also applications, but it doesn't connect to the global internet. Instead, it connects to a state-controlled internal network. Despite this, the phone can do more than you might expect. So when I open up the phone, we see all these familiar icons like music. We also see some apps that look quite familiar, like the one that looks like a Word document or a gaming app that actually quite resembles the NBC logo. What's actually very interesting is that there's an application resembling China's Alipay. So you can make QR code payments here, and you can also transfer money, you can receive money, you can also hail a cab here. Users can also shop, watch television and movies and play games. There's an app called International Football, showing Messi. You can play as him. There are many countries on here, but not the US or South Korea. To understand what it's actually like to own a smartphone inside North Korea, we showed the device to someone who had used one there. Ryu Seong-hyeon is a former North Korean soldier who defected to South Korea. So where did you buy your smartphone when you were inside North Korea?

It's an underground black market.

How much does a smartphone cost inside North Korea?

US$ 250. Yeah, so it's pretty expensive for North Korea. The military officer, their one month salary, less than $1. So the rich people can use this phone. Probably 10% North Korean, 10% has this kind of phone.

Despite seeming like a regular phone, this phone actually has features that we would not see in other countries. If you type in the name of Kim Jong Un, who is the leader of North Korea, it automatically bolds his name, that's how important he is. That does not happen to any other words. If you try to type in the South Korean word for South Korea, it will automatically turn into a warning sign that says, "banned." So if you type in Korean, which would be the shortened version of boyfriend or a slang word in South Korean that's been popularized by K-dramas, it automatically turns into Damza, Boy, and Tingu, which is friend, so just male friend. The restrictions are designed to limit the influence of foreign culture, particularly from South Korea. Were you able to watch any American or South Korean films or dramas on your phone?

No.

Why not?

Because it's dangerous for me. According to the North Korea law, if somebody watch a K-drama or US contents, they go to prison for five year like that. So if somebody share that content with others, they shooting. Yeah, they'll be shot.

Ryu has good reason to be nervous. The North Korean authorities can monitor everything. There's this folder called Watch History on the phone, and it appears to be randomly taking screenshots of activity on this smartphone, just to keep track of what pages you're going into so that the state knows what you're looking at at all times. We don't know when it's happening or what files are being saved, but what we do know is that we can't delete these files.

This has a built-in. It's impossible deleting that application. So they checking that application and they checking history.

For some North Koreans, smartphones have made everyday life more connected and convenient, but that access comes with boundaries set by the all-seeing state. At this point, it's not just inside Pyongyang that people are using smartphones. But even while rolling out new technologies, the Kim regime has been able to maintain strict control over what the population sees and experiences on their smartphones. At the end of the day, this is a phone from 2023, and we don't know what new technologies have already been rolled out inside North Korea, but it will keep advancing and developing.