Back in 2010, if you looked around, from young college kids to corporate professionals, all carried a BlackBerry. It was the QWERTY keyboard and the BBM service that kept everyone hooked. Apps weren't as popular back in the day. In the last 6 years, things have changed. Nokia doesn't make phones anymore. And BlackBerry, like the Nokia of old, is almost dead and buried in the mobile phone space. So what does it do to revive its fortunes?
Well, it's something people have been asking it to do for years; to create a BlackBerry which runs on Google's Android and has a full QWERTY keyboard. Essentially, that's what the Priv is. Compelling as that may sound, it is too little, too late for the pocket giant from Waterloo.
The BlackBerry Priv is a risky and costly venture - acknowledging the irony of saying that about a device, which is both superbly equipped and tightly secured.
Hopefully, for BlackBerry's sake, the Priv will meet the expectations it set for itself and go down as a visionary, not an anomaly. Before we start exploring it though, we simply feel compelled to stop and let its marvelous ambivalence sink in.
We've been following BlackBerry's journey from the top of the smartphone market to the bottom, and it has been extremely tempting on multiple occasions to declare the company effectively dead. Poor decision after poor decision has resulted in the company's products - which were the absolute must-have status symbols of an entire generation - being seen now as relics from the distant past. There are holdouts, no doubt, but their number is diminishing every day.
BlackBerry, the company formerly known as Research in Motion, has had many chances over the past few years to set its course right, but has instead launched one outlandish product after another; trying anything that might work. We liked the unusually shaped Passport , but it was never going to be a mass-market success. More recently, the Classic represented a U-turn in strategy to cater to everyone who hated BB10's touch interface, and the Leap (Review) tried to appeal to budget-minded fans but missed that mark spectacularly.
The front is nearly all glass, with curved edges on the sides. The screen itself doesn't curve like the one on the Galaxy S6 Edge; the space to the sides is mostly the screen border. This means there's no need to strain to read what's at the screen's outer edges, but you'll still have to deal with reflections that are impossible to avoid.
A large BlackBerry logo is placed front and centre above the screen, with a programmable multi-colour notification LED the front camera further to the right. When the screen is off and the phone is plugged in, you'll see a coloured bar indicating the current charge percentage along the screen's right edge. Apart from this, there is no real way in which BlackBerry has integrated the curves into its software or user experience.
Beneath the sliding screen is a lip that lets you push it up with one hand. Unfortunately, we often hit the on-screen Android home button when trying to do this. The bottom of the phone's lower half is thick enough to accommodate the phone's loudspeaker. The power button is on the left and the volume buttons are on the right.
The phone's rear has a carbon fibre finish which is smooth but still easy to grip. There's a thick silver ring around the camera lens, which protrudes quite a bit from the rear. The two-tone LED flash is right next to it. The Nano-SIM and microSD trays are located on the top of the phone's lower half, while the Micro-USB port and 3.5mm socket are on the bottom.
We were concerned about the Priv's size and weight, especially its balance when open. While not ideal, BlackBerry has done well. What surprised us was that this phone is really uncomfortable to talk on - the protective ridge on top dug into our ears and no amount of adjusting made it any better.
That said, the hardware is still quite strong. There's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, with six CPU cores, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with the option of up to 2TB more using a microSDXC card, LTE support on Indian frequencies, NFC, GPS, and dual-band Wi-Fi ac. The display measures 5.43 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 1440x2560 pixels.
Well, it's something people have been asking it to do for years; to create a BlackBerry which runs on Google's Android and has a full QWERTY keyboard. Essentially, that's what the Priv is. Compelling as that may sound, it is too little, too late for the pocket giant from Waterloo.
Introduction
A curved screen QWERTY slider by BlackBerry that runs Android, are we getting this right? We double checked and the Priv is just as exciting as it is unique. Honestly, it is one of those things many may've fantasized about but nobody actually believed would happen. It's also probably the last chance for BlackBerry to try and turn things around.The BlackBerry Priv is a risky and costly venture - acknowledging the irony of saying that about a device, which is both superbly equipped and tightly secured.
Hopefully, for BlackBerry's sake, the Priv will meet the expectations it set for itself and go down as a visionary, not an anomaly. Before we start exploring it though, we simply feel compelled to stop and let its marvelous ambivalence sink in.
We've been following BlackBerry's journey from the top of the smartphone market to the bottom, and it has been extremely tempting on multiple occasions to declare the company effectively dead. Poor decision after poor decision has resulted in the company's products - which were the absolute must-have status symbols of an entire generation - being seen now as relics from the distant past. There are holdouts, no doubt, but their number is diminishing every day.
BlackBerry, the company formerly known as Research in Motion, has had many chances over the past few years to set its course right, but has instead launched one outlandish product after another; trying anything that might work. We liked the unusually shaped Passport , but it was never going to be a mass-market success. More recently, the Classic represented a U-turn in strategy to cater to everyone who hated BB10's touch interface, and the Leap (Review) tried to appeal to budget-minded fans but missed that mark spectacularly.
Look and feel
The Priv immediately feels like a super-premium device, but this is more about its build quality than its looks. At first glance, it doesn't have the "wow" factor that, for example, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge (Review | Pictures) has, but that changes the instant you flick the screen up to reveal the keyboard. It's been a really long time since we had anything other than a flat candybar phone to play with, and everything about the mechanism from its sound to its smoothness feels really, viscerally satisfying. It's way too easy to keep absentmindedly flicking the screen up and down when the phone is in your hands, and at no point did we have even the slightest doubt about the durability of BlackBerry's design.The front is nearly all glass, with curved edges on the sides. The screen itself doesn't curve like the one on the Galaxy S6 Edge; the space to the sides is mostly the screen border. This means there's no need to strain to read what's at the screen's outer edges, but you'll still have to deal with reflections that are impossible to avoid.
A large BlackBerry logo is placed front and centre above the screen, with a programmable multi-colour notification LED the front camera further to the right. When the screen is off and the phone is plugged in, you'll see a coloured bar indicating the current charge percentage along the screen's right edge. Apart from this, there is no real way in which BlackBerry has integrated the curves into its software or user experience.
Beneath the sliding screen is a lip that lets you push it up with one hand. Unfortunately, we often hit the on-screen Android home button when trying to do this. The bottom of the phone's lower half is thick enough to accommodate the phone's loudspeaker. The power button is on the left and the volume buttons are on the right.
We were concerned about the Priv's size and weight, especially its balance when open. While not ideal, BlackBerry has done well. What surprised us was that this phone is really uncomfortable to talk on - the protective ridge on top dug into our ears and no amount of adjusting made it any better.
Specifications
The BlackBerry Priv is a high-end phone with suitably high-end specs, comparable to today's top performers. Unfortunately, it has launched just weeks before the entire Android world will be refreshed, with every top company expected to launch a new flagship at MWC 2016 in late February. The Priv will look a lot like last year's news very soon.That said, the hardware is still quite strong. There's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, with six CPU cores, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with the option of up to 2TB more using a microSDXC card, LTE support on Indian frequencies, NFC, GPS, and dual-band Wi-Fi ac. The display measures 5.43 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 1440x2560 pixels.
Software and usage
Rather than fork Android, which other companies have attempted to do, BlackBerry has gone with the whole Google package, apps and all. The Priv runs Android 5.1.1 though a Marshmallow update should be released by the end of March. There are lots of tweaks and modifications, but surprisingly not a custom skin that might replicate the BB10 experience more faithfully. To the casual user, BlackBerry's involvement in the software of the Priv won't seem any deeper than other manufacturers go, with just a few preloaded apps and cosmetic touches.
That said, there are security-centric features under the hood. BlackBerry knows what its enterprise and corporate customers demand - as we've been told, the name "Priv" comes from "privilege" and "privacy". BlackBerry promises that it has "hardened" Android to protect your data and defend against malware and intrusion attempts. An app called DTEK gives you an overview of your security settings and what your apps have been up to.
The first thing you'll notice on the Android homescreen is the trademark red BlackBerry "splat" badge on app icons, letting you know that you have notifications. While eye-catching, you lose the ability to see how many notifications you have in each app. The badge has also been incorporated into the notifications on the lockscreen and in the pull-down shade: a strip of icons along the top lets you see alerts for each individual app or phone function, and for some reason there is a numerical count next to each one here, even though they're much smaller.
There's also a semi-transparent tab on the right, and if you swipe inwards from the edge, you'll be taken to a screen that shows you your upcoming calendar events, unread messages, to-dos, and favourite contacts. You can turn it off if you like, or swap it to the left. It doesn't serve very much purpose since it duplicates a lot of other functionality.
You navigate through the OS just as you would any other Android phone. That means BB10's confusing gestures have thankfully been dispensed with, but also that you don't get to quickly dip into the BlackBerry Hub to check activity. The hub still exists, but as an app, not a seamless part of the underlying OS. It's a powerful way to sort through emails and messages, especially if you juggle between multiple accounts and services, and it really does make use of the large screen. However, the floating buttons everywhere are really distracting.
Final words
So is the Priv the long-overdue messiah BlackBerry so desperately needs to regain some ground in the mobile realm? Well, sadly, there is no easy answer. While the Priv is a nice device on its own, but its nature, purpose, and target audience and its position within the BlackBerry protfolio is riddled with ambiguity, which hopefully won't prove too confusing and detrimental to the model's success.
Most of us, or at least the ones who want to see the once great Canadian giant back on its feet can't help but view the Priv as a major strategic shift and a sort of drastic measure to regain some hip factor amongst the growing Android crowd.
That sort of wishful thinking might be nice on the surface, but it inevitably leads to a few less-than-favorable observations. First, there is the issue of price - if popularity is what BlackBerry is after, a €700 plus price point won't exactly invite a huge crowd considering that profit margins throughout the whole industry are slimming down.
The underwhelming Android experience is another brow raiser. Some growing pains are all but expected and BlackBerry will surely work out the kicks eventually, but still, if you go into a store today and shell out the eye-watering amount of money for the Priv, you might naturally expect it to at least perform up to par with let's say a Galaxy S6 flagship, an iPhone 6s or any other hip device.
But that is just it. The Priv might not shine as a tempting everyday user offer, but perhaps we should endeavor to look at it from another perspective, a quintessentially BlackBerry one and that would be as an enterprise-grade secure communication tool. BlackBerry is still a force to be reckoned with in the corporate world with its end-to-end communication platform and various special tailored solutions. One could argue that this is the essence of BlackBerry and its true area of expertise and it is in this context that the Priv finds itself amidst a more favorable crowd.
It constitutes a huge step forward in a few respects. It is definitely a big leap ahead of its BlackBerry siblings in terms of hardware, but, perhaps more-importantly, it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities now that it runs Android natively. Come to think about it, this is hardly a new development path for BlackBerry, which has long showed a lot of affection for the Google's sprawling app ecosystem. Whether or not the Priv will be met with approval and set BlackBerry on a new development path is yet to be seen, but it is undeniable that despite its flaws, it is currently one of the best business smartphones out there.
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