BlackBerry Priv Review: First Android powered Blackberry device that comes at a premium price

PRIV by BlackBerry is the first-ever BlackBerry smartphone powered by Android in India and combines the best of BlackBerry’s productivity, security and privacy features with the wide world of Google Play store apps.

Design and Features

The ultra-thin Blackberry Priv includes a dual-curved screen, touch and physical keyboards, 18MP camera, with tools that allow users to manage and control their privacy. The carbon fibre look all the around the body, the squared off at top and bottom and the material itself is really grippy both on the back and the sides. When the keyboard is closed, its looks pretty clean.

The 5.4-inch dual-curve OLED display offers plenty of room to work or play with rich colors, deep black levels and less power consumption. At a resolution of 2560x1440, it sports an pixel density of 540 PPI – 4x the amount of pixels of a standard HDTV. Along the screen’s curved edge is the Productivity Tab that provides an “at a glance” view of the most pertinent info from BlackBerry Hub, Calendar, Task, and Contacts.

This is the phone that does not need any case to put into and never slid out of my hand once. The power button is housed at left side and the volume controls are housed at right side and can be accessed easily and have great tactile feedback. The front facing speaker at bottom delivers average sound. The slight lid just above the speaker helps you to slide up the screen. The opening and closing spring mechanism feels durable and solid. The smartphones feels more balanced when its open, and will be because of weight spread.

The back of the phone feels quite soft compared to front but also flexes a bit when tapped hard.

PRIV can be integrated with BlackBerry's leading EMM solution, BES 12, which offers cross-platform management of PRIV and other devices; providing a full end to end security solution and secure collaboration applications for business users like Secusuite for secure voice and WatchDox for secure file sharing.

Performance

The OS is pretty close to stock Android, however Blackberry has included some features on its own. For example, you can swipe from bottom and you will be greeted with not only Google Now but also Blackberry Device search and Blackberry Hub.  The Hub surfaces all your notifications from E-mails, Twitter etc into one place.

It also has a feature called Pop up widget, which allows you to swipe up from the icons in home screen to show up their widgets. This is already available in some 3rd party apps in Android, but Blackberry has built into it and proves to be useful in music and media apps.

The multitasking window is redesigned and now features various apps multitasking tray in different size, we are not sure why but that's the way it is. You can double tap to wake up the phones but no reverse phenomenon exists.

We also liked the way notifications were displayed. All the notifications are now packed into a tray and you can target the specific app to view its updates which is pretty useful when you are having various notifications among apps.

Also swipe left from the right curved display and you will get a Productivity tab. Similar to Galaxy S6 Edge, icons and shown and it shows full screen calendar events, contacts, tasks etc. There are no app shortcuts that can be plugged into the Productivity tab right now, but we can expect them in the next software update. The charging indicator is also different and is intuitive and takes the form of a bar in right side of display and grows bigger once the battery charging is increasing and also tells you the time it requires for the full charge.

The Snapdradon 808 processor clubbed with 3GB of RAM delivered snappy performance and great multitasking for a normal to typical use. The OLED display is sharp and has great contrast, great brightness levels and colors. However we did notice heating of the device when used even for 30 minutes of duration.

The BlackBerry Priv handles games very well showing no amount of lag even in high-end games. We played Elite Killer, Gods of Rome, Asphalt 8 and did not find anything much to complain. Graphics in gaming held up strongly and we did not find anything to complain and everything was running smoothly but got heated over normal use. The Quad HD display kicks in and colors displayed were great enhancing your game play experience.

The Keyboard and typing experience

Being a Blackberry device there is also a focus on keyboard. The software keyboard works well but if you like Google Keyboard you can replace it. The keys in hardware keyboard are tiny and are close together, however packs some tricks into it for those who want to use that keyboard.

Swipe left to delete one word at a time, or if you want to strike out some specific words or add between them double tap to enter the cursor mode and just like touchpad you can move around the cursor at the desired location. The touch pad behavior works in other apps too, so you can scroll down a Twitter timeline or Instagram profile just by swiping along the top of the keyboard. This is useful when you want your finger off of display and want to see the full screen.

Camera Performance

The 18MP camera with OIS and Dual LED flash is better than previous Blackberry smartphones. The camera app is clean and easy to use and takes a little time to take a capture a shot. You can control the exposure from the bottom slider. The camera captured clean and nice shots with plenty of attention to sharpness and detail.

Sample Images

Battery Life

The 3410 mAh battery fuels the handset and provides enough juice to last for a day on mixed usage including social media apps, light gaming and other productivity tools. In our video loop test wherein we looped a video until the battery drained out, it lasted for 7 hours and 20 minutes.