Back during Mobile World Congress earlier this year, a new company hit the news offering yet another super-secure handset running their own version of Android. This time however, it was from a company that understands what corporate entities and governments need in order to keep their information under lock and key. The idea behind Sikur’s – an established and trusted security firm used the world over – GranitePhone is to provide a modern communication device that’s designed for just that; communicating. A simple, yet brutal approach to keeping information safe, the GranitePhone cannot have applications installed, very few settings can be changed and it’s running a forked version of Android for maximum security. For something that seems so corporate and designed for the business world, anybody can now pre-order the final product.
During Mobile World Congress, the company was showing off a Nexus 5 running their forked version of Android, but they promised dedicated hardware in the Fall, and here it is. The GranitePhone is a 5.0-inch 1080p device running a Snapdragon 615 octa-core CPU, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. These specs aren’t exactly exciting, but the 16-megapixel rear and 8.0-megapixel front-facing cameras do lift things a little here. Again, this is designed purely as a communications device, there’s a special messaging platform here that when two GranitePhone users talk to each other everything is encrypted, but otherwise we’re looking at a device that’s locked down from the ground up and designed to be just that.
If the specs haven’t got your heart racing, the price tag sure will. At $999 USD retail, this is not cheap, at all. However, those that pre-order – via the source link below – before November 15th will save $50 and pay just $849. What’s interesting here, is that anybody can go ahead and purchase this phone, I can pay by PayPal and I don’t have to enter sort of credentials or anything like that, I could be anybody. Which does raise the question of whether or not Sikur will succeed in marketing these to big players around the world if “bad guys” are able to purchase them at will as well.