When the BlackBerry Priv was announced late last year, it was an AT&T-exclusive. While that exclusivity is now a thing of the past, the company is still treading cautiously when it comes to introducing the handset in markets around the world. However, now that the smartphone vendor is apparently well on its way to re-establishing itself as a serious contender in the enterprise segment, BlackBerry has announced that it has started selling the Priv in a number of European markets like Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, alongside other European countries like the UK and Germany, where the Priv has already been available for purchase for the last few weeks now. As for the pricing, BlackBerry says the device can be bought online by customers in the newly-announced markets at €779 from the company’s online store, ShopBlackBerry.
Taking a quick look at the BlackBerry Priv, it happens to be the very first Android-powered smartphone from the Canadian smartphone vendor formerly known as Research in Motion. The device was launched earlier this year, and by all accounts, has been fairly well-received by both the tech media as well as paying consumers at large. The handset 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 Snapdragon 808 SoC and sports 3 GB of RAM along with 32 GB of storage. 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.
With the Priv seeing higher sales figures than any of Blackberry’s recent releases, the company’s CEO, Mr. John Chen, recently announced that the company targets total sales of 5 million units each year. Encouraged by the initial success of the device, the company has also let it be known that all future smartphones from the company might run on Android, thereby sounding the death knell for BB OS. Recent media speculations have also suggested that the Canadian company may well be working on a new mid-range handset to be launched later this year.