North and South Korea team up on GSM phone

Well here's a first; companies from North and South Korea are joining together to build a handset for North Korea and other markets. It took two years of talks between the North Korean Samcholli Technical and South Korean
VK, but they got it together and will be making the first ever Korean-language GSM phone. This is good news for North Koreans since they use a GSM network and have been limping along on foreign language phones while their counterparts in the South have been rocking some of the
sexiest phones known to humankind on their CDMA network. Samcholli will send 10 researchers to Beijing to kick it at the VK research center and help develop the phone which should come out sometime next year. It might even end up in the US, targeted at Korean speakers who'd like to hop on a snazzy GSM network, but we're guessing since this is the first Korean-language GSM phone they're probably going to go for a lower end handset targeted at the mass market. Too bad, we'd totally love to celebrate this newfound union of North and South with some
seven megapixel cameraphone action.