When you write about phones all day long, your mind often wonders about what type of phones famous leaders and despots use. Kim Jong-un’s name is everywhere at the moment, following a series of pretty alarming nuclear missile tests.

So obviously I wondered about what type of phone the leader of North Korea uses. I mean, surely even despot leaders like Kim Jong-un need a phone? But what phone does he use? At first, I guessed it’d probably be a Samsung phone, given the company’s proximity to North Korea.

I was dead wrong though; Kim Jong-un uses an HTC phone apparently, though no one is sure what model. How do we know? Simple, a picture of Kim Jong-un was published recently and by his side is a phone (and it looks like its in a case).

Samsung immediately confirmed that it was NOT a Samsung phone. I knew it wouldn’t be an iPhone, for obvious reasons, so I did some digging and, according to South Korea’s Intelligence Agency, the phone in the picture is an HTC phone.

So if it is an HTC phone, you have to ask the question: how did he get it? And then, did he get the latest Android Oreo update?

It is impossible to tell which model he is using from the image, it’s too blurry and you can’t get enough detail. To me, it looks like a really old HTC model – like one from 2012/13.

What do you think? Any ideas?