Gadgetory

what's up guys lon here from Android Authority and today we're taking a look at the black very prim and this is not going to be a full-on review or anything like that I'm just going to offer you guys my personal opinions and what I think about this particular device so I'm not going to get too in-depth with all the technical information regarding this phone if you want to know more about that stuff make sure to check out Josh's full review where he will also be offering his own take on what he thinks about this device as well but with that being said I'm just going to talk about what I personally think about the Prive as far as the design the build quality the performance and all that good stuff so let's go ahead and get right into it this is the BlackBerry Prive so let's start with the design of the BlackBerry prin so it's a portrait slider phone so we haven't seen this form factor in quite a long time so it's kind of interesting to see that blackberry brought this back and it's actually not all that thick for being a portrait slider it's a little bit over 9 millimeters thick which is actually not all that bad and it feels really good in the hand it's easy to use in one hand because it only has a 5.4 inch display which is kind of an odd screen size but it's still very manageable in one hand and it's also extremely easy to hold on to because the back is very grippy it's got this sort of a carbon-fiber / Kevlar look to it but it's a very grippy back probably the grippy astac that i've ever touched on any smartphone and it's sort of tacky in a way not tacky in a fashion sense but tacky in just the way that it feels it just sort of suction cups itself to your hands so this is phone that you can definitely go without a case and not have to worry about dropping it I was a pretty big fan of the portrait slider form factor back in the day so the fact that the BlackBerry Prive is a portrait slider form factor kind of takes me back a little bit and I really like it it's a spring-loaded mechanism so it's really easy to slide up and down so if you slide up the phone about half way it pretty much just springs into place and the same thing we said when you slide the phone downwards it just springs right back and it's really easy to slide up and down because the front half actually protrudes a little bit above the bottom chin and there's also a metal rail that sort of lets you sort of grab onto with your thumb and slide the phone up and down so these sliding McNab's mechanism works extremely well and obviously when you slide the phone upwards you reveal the physical QWERTY keyboard which is something that BlackBerry has been known for for a very long time and I don't know if blackberry enthusiasts if there's any of them left out there if they're going to be satisfied with this particular keyboard because I actually found it to be a little bit cramped and it's just really hard to type on and I don't have the biggest hands in the world but you know it's just not the easiest keyboard to type on and the travel on the keys are actually kind of a little bit shallow the nice thing about the keyboard though is that also doubles a trackpad so you can actually use it to swipe between home screens or scroll within a webpage or your social media feeds but I did notice that the scrolling is very inconsistent sometimes it's inverted and sometimes it's not inverted and I'm not entirely sure why that is but the keyboard also can be used to autocomplete words so if you're typing out a text message and you see a word that pops up that you want to use you can just swipe up on the keyboard to autocomplete that word and you can also swipe left to delete words as well so I really like the functionality of the keyboard I just wish the typing experience was a little bit better so like I mentioned earlier the screen on the front is a five point four inch screen and it's an AMOLED screen with 2560 by 1440 resolution so being that it's AMOLED you're going to get those really inky deep blacks those vibrant saturated colors and high contrast ratios and the high resolution makes it great for you know text browse on the web watching videos and playing games so I really had no problems with the screen at all I don't think it's the best AMOLED screen that I've ever seen on a smartphone I think that title still belongs to Samsung but generally I really had no problems with this display at all it's a great looking screen and one thing that you'll notice what the display is that it's also curved along the edges sort of like the Samsung Galaxy s6 edge except it's not quite as drastic and there's really no functionality to the curved glass at all it's more for aesthetics and the majority of the curved glass is actually mostly just bezel anyways alright so let's talk a little bit about the performance of the BlackBerry Pritz running on a snapdragon 808 with 3 gigabytes of RAM and generally performance has been pretty good um you know it opens apps quickly it multitasks and plays games well so I've really had no issues with you know general everyday performance but you know some users have reported to have a very buggy experience with the Prive and some people have reported that they've had a flawless experience with the prove and I happen to fall into the former rather than the latter and some of the bugs are pretty minor but then there's ones that sort of stick out at you a little bit so for example sometimes when I'm sweat when I'm typing on the physical keyboard and I want to which to the software keyboard the software keyboard doesn't want to show up and I actually have to exit out of the application and open it back up to get the software keyboard to finally pop up another problem that I've had is with phone calls when I hit the dial button on the dialer it actually completely blacks out the screen and if I hit the power button it doesn't come back on which I thought was extremely weird I'm not exactly sure why it does that I don't know if that's intentional or if that's a bug because I don't have you know another crib to compare it to but the biggest issue that I've had with the privet is that it overheats it actually gets extremely hot when playing games or watching videos and I know phones get warm but this was beyond warm it actually got physically hot to the point where I had to actually put the phone down and just sort of let it rest for a bit next up is the camera so on the rear is an 18 megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization and it's actually a pretty decent camera it takes really great photos in most lighting situations so outdoors and daylight or in well-lit places I take some really great looking photos really great colors sharpness in just a lot of detail but the biggest problem is low-light it doesn't perform that great in low-light there's a lot of noise and photos just tend to sort of fall apart in low-light situations and the front-facing camera isn't really all that great either it's only 2 megapixels so you're not exactly getting the most high resolution selfies but it is serviceable for that particular purpose now the camera app itself I think you know it's very easy to use for the most part and I do like the exposure slider on the bottom of the viewfinder it makes it really easy to just dial in the exposure on the fly but the actual act of taking a photo is really slow like the shutter speed is very slow it takes a few seconds before you actually can take a photo that's a little bit unacceptable for a flagship smartphone in 2015 and hopefully that's another thing that can be resolved in a software update battery life for me has just been ok eh I can get through a full day if I'm very diligent with my usage so if I stay away from YouTube videos or playing games I can make it through a full day just fine but if I play games or watch youtube videos for even just a couple of hours typically find myself having to recharge a midway through the day at least once a day if not more one of the most notable features of the BlackBerry Prive is actually the software so it's not running on BlackBerry's own operating system it's actually running on Android so it's android 5.1.1 lollipop and it's a mostly stock build of Android so you're not going to find too much customization here from blackberry and they've sort of taken the Motorola approach as far as how they've chosen to customize Android so you still have blackberry messenger pre-installed and you also have detect by blackberry which is a security application and security is something that a lot of blackberries have been known for in the past so you're still getting back here with the BlackBerry Prive there's a lot of other really cool features built in here so for example you can actually use third-party icon packs from the Play Store to customize the launcher which is something you can only normally do with a third-party launcher but you can actually do it here with the built-in launcher on the blackberry Prive and that about wraps it up for this video again this is not a full review if you want to see the full review and find out what Josh thinks about the blackberry proved make sure to check the link down below in the description or over here in an annotation or up here in a card wherever it might be but overall I think the BlackBerry Prive is a solid smartphone it's got really great blackberry hardware and really great software with an Android operating system and BlackBerry's customizations on top now will this phone be enough to actually save blackberry I don't think one phone can actually do that but we will see we'll see if this actually helps BlackBerry out but that's really it guys hopefully you enjoyed this video and give it a thumbs up if you did and also subscribe to the channel which is down below or up here if you haven't already and if you want to see more here from us at Android authority make sure to check out the links over here on the side and also check 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