Gadgetory

i'm michael fisher with pocket now and the first smartphone i ever owned was a blackberry back then one out of every five smartphones sold was built by the juggernaut known as Research In Motion but a decade later blackberry is on the ropes with less than 1% market share and it hopes to revive its flagging fortunes by focusing on privacy and on once again making it a privilege to own a blackberry does the BlackBerry Prive deserve a place in your holster let's find out the BlackBerry Prive is a fusion of new and old concepts unlike anything else on the market today its quad HD P OLED display is absolutely gorgeous its Gorilla Glass 4 lens curving at the sides and stopping short of the bottom lip to make room for a front firing speaker with a voice as loud as its grille is wide up top is the BlackBerry brand name flanked by that old BlackBerry trademark the multicolored notification light on the other side the glass weave back cover has some disappointing give to it but it's finished in one of the grittiest soft touch coatings we've ever come across it means it sticks to your fingers when you use a thumb to slide the screen up and out of the way revealing the prigs most distinctive feature there are two ways to look at the pretty board if you're coming from another BlackBerry you'll probably be disappointed because they're crammed into such a thin casing the keys don't have the travel or mechanical feedback BlackBerry's come to be known for these keys aren't as clicky as those on the classic and they're not as spacious as those on the passport but the Privy is one of only a very few Android phones to pack a physical keyboard of any kind and it easily beats what little competition remains though it's a little cramped it's still designed very well after about a week of practice we're now able to type more words per minute with greater accuracy with the physical keyboard than the software one now BlackBerry's virtual keyboard is just as good as ever with excellent predictive text that lets you swipe directly on the keys to autocomplete but we really only use it when we need to use the Priven handed the rest of the time we prefer the physical keyboard and not just for typing BlackBerry has used capacitive sensors along with androids Mouse framework to make the keyboard into one big trackpad that means you can place the cursor exactly where you want it just by moving your thumbs across the buttons it also means you can scroll lists webpages menus and more without ever touching the screen considering how tall the privy is when it's open that makes for a much more comfortable experience then there's the shortcuts you can program any of the prigs keys as a quick launch button to open any app you want and each supports either a short or a long press for a total of 52 possible shortcuts or you can set any keystroke to open device search letting you jump right into a contact and app or a google search okay so we've been focusing on the upsides of the privy experience unfortunately things do start getting substantially bumpier when it comes to software this is a custom interface built atop Android lollipop and that older foundation means the privileged significant improvements brought by Android marshmallow things like performance upgrades battery saving measures and most crucially for a phone that bills itself as a private device individual app permissions BlackBerry has promised a marshmallow upgrade sometime in 2016 until then it's D Tech Security Suite will have to do and much of what this offers is generic simple stuff like using a lock screen but it does let you know which apps are asking for specific data like your location which is useful the prytt also comes with device wide encryption enabled out of the box and a variety of behind the scenes security measures though taken together they don't provide much more security than comparable offerings from say Samsung or Google oddly there's no fingerprint scanner in sight the BlackBerry launcher is peppered with custom enhancements many carried over from blackberry 10 most prominent is the hub which aggregates notifications from various sources into a single stream if you like getting all your alerts in one list this is the best way to do it longtime blackberry users will feel right at home here unfortunately that means they'll also feel right at home waiting for the hub to catch up to them it's sluggish even more so than it was on BB ten and like much of the Privy experience its inconsistent the Google Hangouts isn't supported for example that inconsistency isn't confined to the hub it bleeds over into third-party titles as well while the Gmail app recognizes keyboard shortcuts the inbox by Gmail app does not keyboard scrolling works in Instagram and Twitter but it's inverted in Facebook and it doesn't work at all in Google Maps it also makes Google Docs interesting to say the least the mere presence of the keyboard makes games like asphalt 8 basically unplayable at least until they're updated and otherwise useful features like device search are hobbled by a mixture of performance issues and bad design decisions there's so much lag that it either doubles up on the first letter you type or drops it completely and it doesn't clear searches between sessions like in BB 10 these problems are ashamed because the BlackBerry launcher has some really smart features if you're using a trusted device like a SmartWatch you can set the Prive to automatically wake up when it detects it's been picked up and it'll go to sleep when you put it facedown anytime you see an app icon with these three dots beneath it you can swipe up on it to reveal its accompanying widget and then tap anywhere else to close it when you're done which is so cool swipe in from the edge and you get the productivity tab quick shortcuts to tasks email contacts and calendar all this makes the Provera complex smartphone but also one you can tweak more extensively than most androids blackberries have never been known for their cameras and the probe looks to change that it's the same sensor from the Moto X pure edition cropped to 18 megapixels and given optical stabilization and it's capable of some solid photos with accurate colors and crisp detail in daylight it can even make waning autumn afternoon light work for it in some cases with HDR helping out in the shadows at the expense of saturation colors sometimes suffers in general especially in low-light where everything just gets kind of washed out full of grain we shot a few photos side by side with the Nexus 6p whose camera did a much better job of preserving color and contrast especially at night so the probe is capable of taking decent photos as long as you stick to the primary camera we can't say the same for the selfie shooter an anemic 2 megapixel module whose main distinctions are digital noise and poor low-light performance in camcorder mode where the privy out at 4k and 30fps the output is so-so on the bright side the stabilization does a really nice job compensating for footsteps and handshakes and auto focus and exposure keep up with even quick pants audio capture is pretty nice to able to separate the sound of a sneeze from the sound of a breeze nice video is notably sharp as well especially in 4k where you can just freeze the playback to get a really nice frame but in smooth expanses like a clear sky there's an awful lot of digital noise almost like compression artifact ting it's not enough to make the video unwatchable but it's definitely a little distracting fortunately you can shoot all the 4k video you like if you invest in a memory card the privies a microSD slot to augment the 32 gigs of on-board storage we've used the BlackBerry prefer 7 days on t-mobile between rural New York and Greater Boston and we've actually made more phone calls than usual in that time part of that is because the previous just subtank comfortable to talk on with its tall display deployed neither we nor our callers had any complaints about sound quality over either earpiece or speakerphone and the dedicated mute key which at first struck us as kind of dumb is one of those features you have to experience to understand how convenient it can really be we touched on the system lag a few minutes ago and well the privet is much smoother than it was out of the box due to a recent software update there's still plenty of room for improvement in terms of fluidity throughout there are also just weird annoyances that you don't see on other flagship smartphones apps crash pretty regularly and every time it boots up it takes several minutes to get itself sorted during which time it runs the processor like crazy just like on the Moto X the Snapdragon 808 runs pretty hot on the Prive under even a moderate load and maybe that has something to do with the battery life we're getting which is undistinguished we were only able to get more than four hours of screen on time over a 16-hour day once in seven days now we routinely run our phones pretty hard here at the pea machine and this is a Canadian review unit not built specifically for t-mobile but that's still a pretty lame showing given the phone's huge battery the BlackBerry Prive is a device we really want to like and not just for nostalgia sake it packs an innovative keyboard and a beautiful display into a unique form factor and it brings some really thoughtful software improvements that make Android more useful and customizable especially in terms of messaging for enterprise users with specific needs for the BlackBerry faithful willing to sacrifice consistency for a broader ecosystem or for Android users desperate for something different the Prive is absolutely worth of by everyone else though we'll want to wait a bit there's probably no device out there right now that more badly needs a marshmallow update which seems likely to fix many of the issues we have with the Prive but that won't happen until sometime in the new year at which point the price might be a little more reasonable than its currently exorbitant $700 for BlackBerry's sake we hope that price drop and that software update comes sooner rather than later for much more of the good bad and ugly concerning the BlackBerry prim folks pay us a visit at pocketnow.com for the full length review available November 19th and linked in the description below and until next time this has been michael fisher captain to phones on twitter reminding you to keep your privilege private for your privacy privilege whatever thanks for watching see you next time