According to a press release by AT&T, the carrier will start offering the BlackBerry Priv smartphone on its network from the 6th of this month. With a two-year contract, the privacy-focused Android smartphone from the Canadian company will cost $249. The carrier has also revealed that “well qualified” subscribers will be able to buy the phone with zero down payment as part of its ‘Next’ plans, with monthly payments ranging from a low of $24.67 on Next 24 for 30 months, and going up to $37 per month on Next 12, for a period of 20 months. BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion, made the Priv official last month after numerous leaks and speculations regarding the very first Android device from the company.
Coming to the hardware specs of Blackberry’s first ever Android smartphone, the device comes with a sliding physical QWERTY keyboard, which has become a bit of a rare commodity these days. The Blackberry Priv also features a 5.4-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display, with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels (QHD). The handset is powered by an MSM8992 Snapdragon 808 SoC from Qualcomm. The system-on-chip comes with an integrated hexa-core CPU, with two Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.44 GHz. The chipset also comes with an Adreno 418 GPU for all its graphics processing needs. The Blackberry Priv sports 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, and supports microSD cards of up to 200 GB in capacity.
As for the cameras, the rear-facing primary camera on the Priv is an 18-megapixel unit with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, optical image stabilization, phase detection autofocus and a dual-LED, dual-tone flash. As for the front-facing selfie-cam, a 2-megapixel sensor is all the smartphone has to offer. Coming to the device’s connectivity options, the smartphone supports LTE on a number of bands, along with support for HSDPA and GSM. The device also supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot, Bluetooth v4.1, A2DP and microUSB v2.0. As for sensors, the Blackberry Priv comes fairly endowed as well, with an accelerometer, an altimeter, a gyroscope, a ToF proximity sensor, a compass and A-GPS. The smartphone comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the box and carries a 3,410 mAh Li-Ion battery.