Canadian smartphone vendor BlackBerry’s first-ever Android-powered handset will soon be coming to India, the world’s third-largest smartphone market. According to latest reports doing the rounds of the country’s tech media, the company has sent out invitations for the BlackBerry Priv launch party scheduled for the 28th of this month. The device was originally launched late last year in the US and was an AT&T exclusive to begin with. Now that the exclusivity period is over, the device will soon be available on other major carriers in the country, including Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. Back in December, the handset went on sale in the UK and Germany, and earlier this month, the device was introduced to a number of other European markets like Spain, Italy, the Netherlands. Just last week, the device was launched in France as well.
While the BlackBerry Priv comes with an MSRP of $699 in the US, European buyers will have to pay a significantly higher price of €779 if they wanted to get their hands on the device. While the Indian price hasn’t been disclosed as yet, it is expected to fall somewhere between the US and European pricing, if BlackBerry is to follow the prevalent trend amongst Android vendors. The Priv, of course, is the first-ever Android-powered handset from Canadian company BlackBerry, formerly known as Research in Motion. The device was introduced last year in October, and multiple rumors since then have suggested that the success of the smartphone has encouraged the company to launch a mid-range Android handset as well, thereby putting the fate of BlackBerry’s native operating system, BB OS, in question.
Taking a quick glance at the BlackBerry Priv, the smartphone comes with a sliding physical QWERTY keyboard, and features a 5.4-inch AMOLED display, with a QHD resolution (2560 x 1440). The smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8992 Snapdragon 808 SoC, and sports 3 GB of RAM along with 32 GB of internal storage. The handset also supports microSD cards of up to 200 GB in capacity. While the rear-facing primary camera on the Priv is an 18-megapixel unit, the front-facing selfie-cam comes with a 2-megapixel sensor. The smartphone comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the box and carries a 3,410 mAh Li-ion battery.
