The most talked about Blackberry smartphone in recent times called the Priv, which was surrounded by a host of rumors, leaks and then the company supplying information and photos along with a video of the slide and keypad functionality to keep the interest alive. Blackberry has officially announced their first smartphone running on Android OS.
The BB Priv first made its appearance in MWC 2015 through the hands of Ron Louks who showed off a slider with dual curved display running on BB10 OS at that time. With the news about the Priv coming with Android OS becoming official it became the talk of the town and the company also mentioned in MWC 2015 that this device is going to pave the roadmap for the future for the BB.
The device sported a full QWERTY keyboard which was nicely hidden under the display thanks to the slider design. It is kept sleek although it sports a slider with dimensions of 147 x 77.2 x 9.4mm which extends to 184mm on opening the slider. The keyboard is the biggest asset of BB Priv to take on the competition along with physical buttons it supports capacitive functions like swipes for navigation. The internals are also impressive with a 5.4-inch Quad HD AMOLED display having resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels sporting 543 ppi pixel density.
It is powered by a 1.8GHz 64-bit hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor supported by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage expandable using microSD card. The Priv sports a 18-megapixel rear camera having Schneider-Kreuznach lens with Optical image stabilisation and capable of recording 4K UHD video at 30 frames per second, the front camera is a 2MP shooter.
It runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop and to keep it up to date with the most important feature of BB which is security, it has DTEK a sort of app warning system. It is not Stock Android but has some additions from Blackberry. The curved display can be used to view notifications, messages, calendar events, battery charging percentage etc.
Price and Availability of BlackBerry Priv:
The Blackberry Priv has been launched in UK and US, with the UK store showing monthly price at £49 a month without any upfront cost.There are other offers as well in case you are looking for monthly deals. For those looking for SIM-free devices the BlackBerry Priv is priced at £579.99.
The device is available in US through ShopBlackbery at a cost of $750 for the unlocked version and in Canada it is priced at $949. For Monthly plans AT&T has announced the Priv at$24.67 starting from November 6th.
