BlackBerry Priv, the first and thus far, the only Android-powered smartphone from Canadian smartphone vendor, BlackBerry, has now gone on sale in France via the official ShopBlackBerry store for a price of €779. The device was originally launched late last year in the US at a price of $699, 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 device made its European debut, as it went on sale in the UK and Germany, and just last week, BlackBerry expanded the Priv’s market to include Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. While the Priv’s French price-tag of €779 is at a premium to the device’s US price, the smartphone also costs exactly the same in the other Eurozone markets as well.
For the uninitiated, the BlackBerry Priv is the latest smartphone from Canadian company BlackBerry, formerly known as Research in Motion. The device, of course, is the very first Android-powered smartphone from the vendor, and was introduced late last year amidst persistent complaints about the lack of apps on the BlackBerry World – the app store for BB OS apps. By all accounts, the Priv has mostly been a hit with both the tech media as well as paying consumers at large, which has reportedly resulted in the company’s stock price surging quite a bit in recent times on the back of strong demand for the handset.
The BlackBerry Priv 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, which 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 along with 32 GB of internal storage, and 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.