BlackBerry Priv First Impressions: Return of the BlackBerry Boys

The words 'once upon a time' come to mind when you're talking about BlackBerry. BlackBerry was once the smartphones to have. It was the Walkman before the iPod took over. It was the smartphone before the iPhone and that’s the thing. It WAS a smartphone before the race began for apps, budget, popularity, and every other reason why you shifted from your trusted BlackBerry to an iPhone or one of the many Android smartphones. BlackBerry was on its way out and it was only a matter of time before someone acquired the Canadian company. But, that doesn’t seam to be the case. Two years ago BlackBerry took the bold decision to move to the Android platform, giving up on its BB OS. After the failed attempt to get Android apps on BlackBerry the company decided to go all out with Android as the OS. Did it succumb to the trend of mass market OS adoption or did the company have a few tricks left up its sleeves? Well, we will give our verdict on this when we review the BlackBerry Priv. For now, here's out our first impression of the BlackBerry Priv and straight off the bat we have to say the device looks attractive. Attractive enough to grab your attention, but once you see the price tag, you will think about whether you want to buy this phone or stick with what you’ve got.

Pricing and Specifications

Lets get the simple things out of the way. The BlackBerry Priv is priced at Rs. 62,990, which, of course, is quite expensive. To put things into perspective, the iPhone 6s 64GB is priced at Rs. 59,775. The iPhone 6s Plus 64GB is priced at Rs. 71,900. On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus is priced at Rs. 53,900 for the 32GB variant and the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 32GB is priced at Rs. 47,900. What was Blackberry thinking when it priced the phone at a whopping 63K? It's more or less the same price that Apple has been launching its iPhones at.

Coming to the specifications on offer, the smartphone has a 5.4-inch AMOLED display, with a 2560x1440 pixel resolution and Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. The smartphone runs on the Qualcomm MSM8992 Snapdragon 808 chipset, with a dual-core 1.8GHz and quad-core 1.44GHz processor, coupled with the Adreno 418 GPU and 3GB of RAM. It has 32GB built-in storage expandable up to a whopping 2TB via a microSD card (Best of luck getting a 2TB micro-SD card though). The rear has an 18MP camera with the ability to shoot video in 4K and the front has a 2MP camera. A 3410mAh battery powers the entire package. 

The specifications of the smartphone aren’t ground breaking but it stands toe-to-toe with other flagships on offer, at least in terms of specifications. Before you go crazy in the comment section about Snapdragon 810 or 820, remember that the SD808 is good enough to get the job done. My primary smartphone is a Nexus 5, running on the Snapdragon 800 and that gets the job done just fine. But yes, we will put the optimisation of the hardware and software to the test when we get the smartphone for review. But the specifications have never been the reason to purchase a BlackBerry smartphone. You will buy it for other reasons. No, its not the build and design, but that’s what we are moving to next.

Build and Design

From a build point of view, the device screams BlackBerry. The front of the device is simple, with the curved display. It isn’t like the one we have seen on the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, the curve works to access the shortcut menu that appears when you swipe from the edge of the display.

Below the display we have the speaker and if you slide up from where the speaker is, you will be greeted with the QWERTY keyboard. Any BlackBerry user will feel right at home with the QWERTY keyboard. Simply roll your finger on the keypad to scroll, swipe to access the predicted word, so on and so forth. The keyboard slider is extremely well built. Another great feature of the device is that when you type on Google Docs, you get the entire screen to work with. There is no keyboard on the display, which means that you have more real estate at your disposal. There is also a way to have the signs and symbols appear on the display, just like in the BlackBerry Passport, meaning you don't need to alternate between various keyboard interfaces, like you would on the stock Android keyboard. There are a bunch of nifty things that you can do with the keyboard and we have barely scratched the surface. After all, we spent a measly 20 minutes with the phone.

Coming to the port placement, the device has the micro-USB port and the headphone jack at the bottom and the top of the BlackBerry Priv has the micro-SD and SIM card slots. The left of the device has the power button and the right has the volume rocker.

Overall, the build of the BlackBerry Priv is exactly what you’d expect from BlackBerry. 

OS and Apps

I would love to take the BlackBerry Priv with me in the DeLorian, back to 2005, and show people this smartphone just for their reaction. It says BlackBerry, but runs Android and for many, it’s a dream come true. For the most part, the smartphone runs stock Android with the Blackberry 'swag' thrown into the mix and that is a very good thing.

The OS will feel familiar to any Nexus user and Blackberry has added some handy tweaks to the OS. If you see three dots below an icon, simply swipe to see the corresponding apps widget. No need to waste display real estate with a dedicated widget.

BlackBerry claims that smartphone makers don’t provide software patches to consumers on a regular basis and to a certain extent we can agree with them. BlackBerry has said that the Priv will receive monthly software patches. These patches will mostly be security patches and its no surprise that Blackberry is focusing on security.
 
The BlackBerry Hub is back too. You know? The central location for all your mail, messages and more. The Blackberry Hub doesn’t support all the apps, but the company says that if it sees enough demand, it may extend support for the particular app.

Moving on, the most important part of the Blackberry Priv — DTEK. DTEK is BlackBerry’s security app on the smartphone and the demo we got was quite good. The demo showed how a flashlight app was accessing the smartphone's location and microphone. What does a Flashlight app have to do with the location and microphone? With DTEK, a user can receive notifications when a particular app uses such functions. Now the most obvious question is why not disable the flashlight app's ability to access location and the microphone? BlackBerry has said that this ability will come with the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update on the Priv. If you have a smartphone running Marshmallow, then you know that an app asks for permission before accessing a particular function of the smartphone. Would it have been massive effort for BlackBerry to implement the same in its current state?

Are the Blackberry Boys back?

It’s tough to say without actually reviewing the device. The smartphone launched internationally towards the end of 2015 and it was received mixed reviews. One of the biggest criticisms was the price and the buggy nature of the OS. The price is still a concern but then again, this isn’t a smartphone for the average consumer. As far as the buggy nature is concerned, we will put the phone through its paces before delivering a verdict. Another thing we haven’t really spoken about is the camera and that’s because we’d like to spend time with it before commenting. My first impressions of the BlackBerry Priv lean towards the positive and that scares me. It’s the first time I have enjoyed spending time with a BlackBerry smartphone and a lot of that credit goes to the mixture of the Blackberry hardware and some software features with the Android OS. Do stay tuned as we will bring you an in-depth review of the device as soon as we get our hands on it.