North Korea gets a PDA befitting its Dear Leader

The DPRK’s not exactly the world’s healthiest economy. So it’s with some surprise that we’re now presenting you with North Korea’s newest (only?) touchscreen slab. Apparently, it’s available “in all the computer shops” and is being touted locally as something of a big deal by a Russian blog operating within Pyongyang. Unfortunately, it’s void of any radios of any kind — no GPS, no WiFi, no cellular, no Bluetooth. So really, it’s just an old school Windows CE (judging by the icons) PDA with an electronic dictionary, map of the country, games, media player, and word processor. It also features a handy stylus for poking about the resistive touchscreen and to identify enemies of the state in a crowded room. The high-end 8GB model with microSD slot is said to cost $140 in a country where the average worker is estimated to earn about $1 per month. And here we thought that our gadget addiction was bad. North Korea gets a PDA befitting its Dear Leader originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on November 5, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry