North Korean tablet won’t give you Internet access, but it will play Angry Birds

Tablets have made it to North Korea, but the Internet hasn’t.

A traveler to North Korea spotted The Samjiyon tablet at a trade show and showed off what it could do in the video below. The machine doesn’t have Internet access, but it can play Angry Birds, according to a research report from IDG.

The 7-inch Android tablet not only shows how far behind the North Korean tech makes are, it also shows the vast reach of Rovio’s Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than a billion times. The country’s censors prevent the device from reaching the Internet. Instead, the device can reach a walled-garden online service, dubbed Kwangmyong. But the device can access North Korean government broadcasts.

The device has a 7-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera, a 1.2-GHz processor, and it runs a version of Google’s Android operating system. Angry Birds and other apps come pre-installed. The visitor acquired the device for $200 at a shop in Pyongyang.

“In terms of responsiveness and speed, it can almost compete against the leading tablets,” the IDG news service quotes the visitor as saying. “Tapping and launching apps feels fairly fluid, initializing the camera is as fast as the world’s leading tablets, and there is no noticeable lag when playing games I’m familiar with, like ‘Angry Birds.’ ’’