Two good looks at the new BlackBerry Priv

So things did not really start well with BlackBerry’s new phone, which is by the way called the BlackBerry Priv. There was a lot of good hype before it was unveiled, but BlackBerry CEO John Chen kinda turned off a lot of people with a cringe-fest of an interview highlighting the new phone. It might be because it runs Android (“runs Google” according to Chen), and not BlackBerry’s proprietary operating system. Well, after that forgettable interview, we might get better details from two people who claim to have seen the Priv up close and super personal.

A Redditor, with the handle “iamsorandom”, is the first one to claim a face-to-face look with the Priv, after a BlackBerry executive reportedly let him play around and look at the device for a bit. He has a few pictures of the device see below, which is most likely a close-to-final prototype of the smartphone. On his few minutes with the device, he admits that the BlackBerry Priv feels “nice” and that it has made him “definitely interested in BlackBerry again.” He comments that the Android 5.1 software is “snappy and smooth” in operation, and that the phone feels premium to touch. He did comment, though, that the camera focus was a bit slow in what it does.

The second look is from European tech sit WebStandard, which is a close look at another production unit. They have some great photos of the unit (see below), but still reiterates that their findings are preliminary at best. They ran the unit through an AnTuTu benchmark test, and it gave them a total of around 46,000 benchmark points – which puts it right above the HTC One M8 and the OnePlus One, both 2014 units. They also reported some lags in the almost stock Android interface, and hopes that the lags disappear when they run production.

The BlackBerry Priv, in case you’ve forgotten, runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 2.0Ghz hexa-core processor, supported by 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. For all intents and purposes, that should make for a pretty competent phone. Both testers also confirmed that the phone has both onscreen and physical (slide out) keyboards. The onscreen version disappears when you slide out the physical keyboard.

SOURCE: Tech Times, WebStandard