Christmas is the time for giving, be this Sprint giving T-Mobile US employees some career advice or companies offering discounts and freebies for customers buying a device. Today, we bring some BlackBerry flavored news: if you are shopping for a new device, BlackBerry want potential customers to know that they are offering free accessories and express shipping for selected devices through the ShopBlackBerry website. Whilst BlackBerry are offering discounts for the BlackBerry Passport and BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition, the offer on the BlackBerry Priv is a free sync pod and device case. This offer is available on a number of other devices, including the BlackBerry Classic, Leap, Passport or Passport Silver Edition and is worth up to $95.
The BlackBerry Priv is the Canadian smartphone’s first (official, at least) Android-powered smartphone. The device is based around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, which features a quad core cluster of ARM Cortex-A53 processor cores as the low tier level, and a dual core, ARM Cortex-A57 cluster as the high performance cluster, in a big.LITTLE processor architecture. The Snapdragon 808 is supported by 3 GB of RAM. The device also has a 5.4-inch, high resolution touchscreen and a slide-out hardware keyboard, which doubles up as a trackpad. As regards the software, the BlackBerry Priv runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and BlackBerry report that Android 6.0 Marshmallow will be released for the handset in February 2016. However, BlackBerry are working on keeping the Priv up to date and released the latest security patched version of Android Lollipop before Google had released the update to the Nexus range of devices. We have also very recently seen a slew of BlackBerry application updates released in the Google Play Store.
It remains to be seen how well the Priv sells and how readily it is adopted by the market, but BlackBerry’s work on bringing Android to their hardware, and how quickly they have worked and released security patches into the software, should encourage the established Android industry how to keep devices up to date. Whilst BlackBerry have a foundation of security and software, it is in all of our interests to have critical vulnerabilities patched by the manufacturer. Meanwhile, for customers interested in the BlackBerry Priv and wanting to take advantage of the offer, it runs until 1000 EST on the 5 January 2016.