BlackBerry on Thursday announced, that its first Android smartphone, the physical keyboard featuring Priv, will hit one of the biggest Android markets — India, on Saturday January 30th. The new device will be available to consumers at just under Rs. 63k via Amazon India and offline retail stores.
The smartphone, as we reported earlier, went live on pre-orders in October and was made available to the public in the US and Canada in November. The company recently announced the availability of the Priv in The Netherlands, Italy and Spain, and most recently, in France. It was only a matter of time until the Ontario based company had released its first Android smartphone in the biggest handheld market in the world.
BlackBerry says that all of these launches have been part of their goal to bring their secure Android Smartphone to as many people as possible.
For those of you who do not know about the Priv, here’s a short briefing.
The BlackBerry Priv is the company’s first Android smartphone. And even though it is based on Android which is open-source, the company has made every effort to keep the smartphone as secure as possible — a forte where only a few can match up the Canadian giant.
The Priv currently runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the box and features a 5.4-inch QHD (1440×2560 pixels) AMOLED display with a pixel density of 540ppi. It comes with 32 GB of storage on-board and 3 GB of RAM. The Priv also supports SD cards with up to 2 TB capacity.
It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core processor (1.8GHz dual-core Cortex-A57 and 1.44GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) along with the Adreno 418 GPU. The cameras on this bad boy are a 18 MP rear shooter along with a 2 MP front-facing camera which are capable of recording video at 4K and 720p respectively.
The Priv also comes with all the other goodies you’d expect from a high-end Android smartphone including LTE support, all other connectivity options and a bulk load of useful sensors along with the lovely physical keyboard.
