Advertising it as the world’s most secure Android smartphone, BlackBerry has today unveiled its second Android-based phone in the form of DTEK50. The company’s first Android smartphone, the BB Priv was launched a little under a year ago and was received with mixed opinions. Now the smartphone giant hopes to try its hand in the market with three new phones, the DTEK50 being the first of them.
With this launch, Blackberry is resorting to perhaps its only long-standing, trustworthy feature — security.
The DTEK50 is a mid-range smartphone that doesn’t compromise on features. It is powered by an Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor coupled with an Adreno 405 graphics. The phone comes with 3GB of RAM onboard and features 16GB of storage. This storage is expandable up to 2TB using a microSD card. It runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box alongside BlackBerry’s additional security, privacy, and productivity tools similar to the Priv.
The rear shooter on the DTEK50 is 13MP and we also get an 8 MP front-facing flash camera.
Talking about the design, the DTEK50 sports a 5.2-inch full HD screen with a pixel density of 424ppi. The smartphone is also a shocking 7.4mm thin, making it the slimmest smartphone developed by BlackBerry till date. This might be the result of the Waterloo-based giant chucking out its signature full QWERTY hardware keyboard.
The DTEK50 isn’t the first Android smartphone to claim the title of being the most secure. There have been other devices like Solarin from Sirin Labs, the CryptoPhone 500i etc that have been known for their tight security and privacy settings. To justify their claim, BlackBerry has released a set of features that are supposed to make the DTEK50 true to its claim.
BlackBerry says that the DTEK50 is the quickest to deliver security patches, setting the bar in incident response and patch management to protect your device from malicious threats. The phone comes preloaded with an app called DTEK that allows users to automatically monitor their OS and apps to know when their privacy could be at risk and to take action to improve it.It also tracks applications and notifies you when someone is remotely controlling your device.
The built-in security setup that BlackBerry has created for this smartphone adds security from the start, allowing for the tracking, verification and provisioning of DTEK50. The DTEK50’s boot is also very sophisticated. Each boot sequence makes sure the next component is safe and intact. Not just this, the smartphone uses IPS 140-2 Compliant Full Disk Encryption that protects your personal files.
The smartphone will initially be available for $299 in 8 countries– Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the US. If you want to get it for yourself, head on over to ShopBlackBerry.com.
