Shahriyar Ali
The all new Android powered PRIV by BlackBerry smartphone starts selling in stores in India! The 5.4″ dual-curved Q-HD display with sliding form-factor is truly a marvelous looking device and is surprisingly very thin with all it sports – from physical keyboard hidden beneath the screen to massive 3410mAh battery to keep you running for long. PRIV is available for MRP of Rs. 62,990 (selling price may be cheaper) competing directly with its high-end competitors. We highly recommend everyone to take a hands-on demo in stores near you before making price-tag a verdict.
Unlike any other Android smartphones, PRIV has its own class of luxury. Apart from its unique slider, the rear panel is designed with signature BlackBerry kevlar-like glass-weave texture giving an elegant look & comfort in hands. The phone is thinner than most Android phones like the OnePlus (One & Two), Moto devices etc. which literally amazed everyone at launch earlier this week. The addition to install Micro-SD card up-to 2TB of space is again a limited resource in Android field. We will be giving the phone a longer ride before posting our review. Till then, go to stores near you & only then share your thoughts in comments below.
BlackBerry PRIV Specifications
Display
540 PPI
2560 x 1440 resolution
Camera
18MP OIS camera
4K resolution video at 30FPS
Performance
64BIT Hexacore CPU
2TB Micro SD3 support
3GB RAM
Design
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Size
Height 147 mm / 5.79 in (184 mm / 7.24 in open)
Width 77.2 mm / 3.04 in
Depth 9.4 mm / 0.37 in
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Weight
192 g / 6.77 ozg
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Navigation
All-touch screen, with intuitive gesture based navigation
Touch-enabled keyboard with gesture support and fine cursor control
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Keyboard
On screen BlackBerry® Keyboard
Slide out touch-enabled 4-row physical keyboard
Contextual auto-correction, next-word prediction and a personalised learning engine that gets to know the way you type
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Dedicated Keys
Lock (for Power On/Off), Mute, Volume Up/Down
Display
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Resolution
540PPI
2560 x 1440 resolution
24-bit colour depth
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Screen Size
5.4″ diagonal
16:9 aspect ratio
OS
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Operating System
Android™ OS
Performance
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Processor
Qualcomm 8992 Snapdragon 808 Hexa-Core, 64 bit
Adreno 418, 600MHz GPU
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Memory
3GB RAM
32GB Flash
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Expandable memory
Expandable memory via hot swappable microSD memory card (Up to 2TB)
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Ports
USB 2.0 fully supported with standard microUSB 2.0 cable (included in box)
Cabled-Video Out, 4k @30 fps, supported with standard SlimPort adaptor (not included in box)
Power
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Battery
3410mAh non-removable Lithium Ion battery
Wireless Charging (available in the United States only)
Compatible with Qualcomm® Quick Charge™ 2.0 technology (accessory sold separately)
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Battery Life1
Up to 22.5 hours mixed battery life1
Up to 23.9 hours talk time
Up to 17.6 days standby time
Up to 72.7 hours audio playback
Up to 10.2 hours video playback
Camera & video recording
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Rear camera
18 megapixel auto-focus camera
Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS)
Phase Detect Auto Focus (PDAF), Fast focus lock
HDR
6-element f2.2 lens
Back Side Illumination (BSI2) Stacked Sensor
Dual Colour, Dual 2 mm2 LED Flash – Enhanced photo colour balance
4X digital zoom
Continuous & touch to focus, face detection, image stabilisation
Panorama, Burst, Live Filters
4k Video Recording at 30 fps
1080p HD video recording at 60 fps
6DOF video stabilisation combined with OIS for incredibly smooth video
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Front camera
2MP Fixed-Focus, f2.8
Large 1.75um pixel size
Image & video stabilisation
720p HD video recording
2X digital zoom
Wide Selfie Mode (also known as Selfie Panorama)
Multi-Frame Low Light Enhancement
Multimedia
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Image formats
BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, WEBP
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Audio & video formats
AAC, ADTS, AWB, FLAC, IMY, MID, MP3, MPEG-4, MXMF, OGG, OTA, RTTTL, RTX, VOBSUB, WAV, WEBM, XMF
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Audio & video encoding/decoding
MPEG-4, AAC+, AAC-LC, AC-3, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, DivX, EVRC, FLAC, H.263, H.264, H265/HEVC, MIDI, MJPEG (mov), MP3, MPEG-2, OPUS, PCM, QCELP, VC-1, VORBIS, VP6, VP8, VP9, WMA, WMA 9/10, WMA Pro, Xvid, eAAC+
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Streaming protocols
HTTP, HTTPs, RTMPe, HTTP Progressive Download, HTTP Live, Streaming (HLS) version 3, RTSP
Pre-loaded apps
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BlackBerry Applications
BBM®, BBM® Meetings, BlackBerry® Camera, BlackBerry® Content Transfer, BlackBerry® Device Search, BlackBerry® Keyboard, BlackBerry® Password Keeper, Calendar by BlackBerry®, Contacts by BlackBerry®, DTEK™ by BlackBerry®, Help, Notes by BlackBerry®, Tasks by BlackBerry®, Yahoo!® Finance, BlackBerry® Hub
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Google Applications
Android Device Manager, Clock, Gmail™, Google Chrome™, Google Drive™, Google Maps™, Google Photos, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Play Music, Google Play™ Store, Google Street View™, Google+™, Hangouts™, Messenger, News and Weather, Play Books, Play Games, Search, Setup Wizard, YouTube®
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Google Services
Contacts Sync, Calendar Sync, GMS Essentials, Android System WebView, Google Play Services, Widevine DRM libraries, FaceLock, Google Text-to-speech, Google Talkback, Exchange3Google
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Android Open Source Project Applications
Phone, Calculator
Alerts & notifications
Tone
Vibrate
On-screen or multi-colour LED indicator
(Notification options are user configurable)
Networks & connectivity
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Network bands 2
United States
FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 20, 29, 30 (2100/1900/1800/1700/850/2600/700/700/800/
700/2300 MHz)HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5/6, 8 (2100/1900/1700/850/900 MHz)
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Canada, Latin America, Asia-Pacific
FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 20, 25, 28, 29, 30 (2100/1900/1800/1700/850/2600/900/700/700/700/
800/1900/700/700/2300 MHz)TD-LTE 38, 40, 41 (2600/2300/2500 MHz)
HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5/6, 8 (2100/1900/1700/850/900 MHz)
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Europe, Middle East and Africa
FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17, 20, 28 (2100/1900/1800/1700/2600/900/700/700/800/700 MHz)
TD-LTE 41 (2500 MHz)
HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5/6, 8 (2100/1900/1700/850/900 MHz)
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
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Wi-Fi®
802.11a/c 5GHz
802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz
802.11a/n 5GHz
4G Mobile Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct
2×2 MIMO
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Bluetooth®
Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy (LE) and EDR
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GPS
Assisted, Autonomous and Simultaneous GPS
Support for User Plane and Control Plane GPS
GLONASS Support2
OTDOA
Pre-loaded Google Maps
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NFC
NFC technology is used to create a connection to share information between your BlackBerry device and other NFC-enabled devices or NFC tags. Features on PRIV by BlackBerry that use NFC technology include Android Beam, Tap and Pay, and Tap and Go.
Sensors
Accelerometer, Activity Monitor, Altimeter, Ambient light, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, Proximity, Time of Flight (ToF)
Accessibility
Google TalkBack screen reader for audible output
Face-to-face video chat with Google Hangouts
Google Now voice assistance to answer questions and perform actions
Magnification to zoom in or zoom out
Closed Captioning support
High contrast text, colour inversion and colour correction
Braille support using BrailleBack
Scalable fonts, customisable alerts and notifications and keyboard shortcuts
Certain models rated for use with hearing aids
And more
could not find in any store near my place
Stil can’t find a single place where they have the phone on display
And yes the price is too high, would you expect even the Americans to shell out $930 for this phone? I absolutely love the phone and the slider is really attractive…but the price sort of bursts the bubble for me. I bought the classic the day it was launched in India and was all set to do the same for the priv but not at this price. The competition to this phone is priced much lower and also has better hardware…I don’t really care about the better hardware…wouldn’t mind paying 3-4K over the price of the competition…i would buy it in a second if it is priced at around 43-47k