In September, Blackberry CEO John Chen confirmed that the company was planning to launch a smartphone called ‘Priv’, which he said was “an Android device named after BlackBerry’s heritage and core mission of protecting our customers’ privacy”.
Specifications and pricing for the BlackBerry Priv have now been revealed. Consumers are being offered the handset directly from BlackBerry with a UK SIM-free price of £559 incl. VAT or on a contract from Carphone Warehouse. It’s due to be available later this month.
The BlackBerry Priv weighs 192g. When closed, it measures 147mm x 77.2mm x 9.4mm – but slides open to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. It’s equipped with a 5.4-inch Quad HD display (2560 x 1440 pixels), an 18-megapixel camera and a 1.8GHz 64-bit hexa-core Qualcomm processor, powered by a 3,410mAh battery. There’s 32GB of expandable storage and 3GB of RAM.
Although the BlackBerry Priv runs the Android OS (‘Lollipop’ v5.1.1), it’s also equipped with BlackBerry’s DTEK privacy alert app and has additional hardware protection included as part of the manufacturing process.
[BlackBerry blog]