http://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-Freedom/dp/...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/09/net-delusion-mor...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Siegel-t.htm...
It does help to educate them about the world around them but not much else.
It's true that some families do have televisions; but they're only issued to the most trusted families as gifts from the State and are tuned to only government broadcasts which are heavily censored and controlled.
Regarding increased smuggling from China, you really cannot extrapolate widespread proliferation from the western press published regarding the crackdowns on the smuggling by the government.
Punishment for possessing smuggled devices is so draconian that most people privileged enough to live in Pyongyang (only ~10% of the population) wouldn't risk their lives or that of their families. Electricity is also tenuous in Pyongyang so I think it's reasonable to assume that the situation is orders of magnitude worse throughout the rest of the country where the government invests much less in infrastructure.
The punishment may be draconian but I guess you can reliably evade it by the means of a small bribe.
Pyongyang is kind of special but also nothern regions usually have some niceties due to their proximity to Chinese border (and therefore trade/smuggled goods).
I'm basically parrotting a blogger that writes a lot about both Koreas so I might be not entirely accurate. http://tttkkk.lj.ru/
Radios are still way cheaper.
Imagine being trapped somewhere you have no Internet. Then a fellow traveler lets you borrow something like a Kindle, which has a color screen and the ability to search for subscribe to any RSS feed. Now imagine what it would like to be a native who never had real Internet access and then get such a device.
There's still much more bang for buck for Radio and The Voice of America.
And anyway (s)he's at the cultural stage where one (moving) picture is worth a thousand words. Consider South Korean news feed (North Koreans don't know any other language) - 95% of topics would seem abstract and arcane.
Reduces your point almost to straw an level right there. You don't try to reach him. You go for the young people. You don't sell such devices, you make sure they wash up on the shore or get smuggled in through China. It's the (mid) 21st century equivalent to propaganda pamphlets.
> For him, Internet is a very abstract thing and RSS means nothing.
Of course it doesn't. Just show him the screen. Hell, the things would be heavily used for porn anyhow.
> And you won't be able to supply a reliable connectivity.
Remember I said satellite. Or are you saying that the North Koreans would jam the signal? This could be worked around. For one thing, it would be very hard to jam a spread spectrum signal. Also, you can have the device figure out the jamming has happened and have it listen on a separate channel for information on how switch to the next signal. All of this could be reverse engineered, but the state of the art has it possible to delay the reversing might of the whole internet for an entire year. The NK government would probably take two years, by which time, you're distributing the next version.
> And anyway (s)he's at the cultural stage where one (moving) picture is worth a thousand words.
E-ink screens are capable of video, though this would kill the battery.
> Consider South Korean news feed (North Koreans don't know any other language) - 95% of topics would seem abstract and arcane.
For many, especially the young, that would be an attraction.
(mid) - But like I said earlier, you still get much better bang for the buck with radio. However, you can take the time when price point of such technology becoming inexpensive enough to be practical to manufacture and fling these as propaganda or marketing tools as the time limit for oppressive regimes.