New Delhi:
BlackBerry has announced that it will launch its first Android smartphone - the BlackBerry Priv in India on January 28 at an event in New Delhi.
After several leaks and rumours about the first Android smartphone from BlackBerry, the Canadian mobile company had confirmed in September last year that it will launch the Priv in 2015. The phone was available on pre-orders in October 2015 and it finally went on sale in the US and Canada in November.
The smartphone was priced at $699 in the US. The BlackBerry Priv is based on the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop and sports a 5.4-inch QHD (1440x2560 pixels) Amoled display and a pixel density of 540ppi.
Bears support for a glove mode, the BlackBerry Priv gets its power from a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core processor (1.8GHz dual-core Cortex-A57, and 1.44GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) clubbed with 3GB of RAM and Adreno 418 GPU.
With 32GB of in-built storage, the smartphone also has a hot-swappable microSD expansion slot (up to 2TB). It sports an 18-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilisation, PDAF, dual-LED flash, and 4K video recording. It also features a 2-megapixel front-camera with HD video recording.
On connectivity front, the BlackBerry Priv supports 4G LTE (with the US variant only showing support for India's FDD-LTE Band 3), Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with Direct functionality, Bluetooth 4.1, 3.5mm audio jack, Micro-USB, NFC, and GPS/ A-GPS.
The smartphone also features an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, time of flight (ToF) sensor, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, altimeter, and activity monitor.
3410mAh battery provides up to 22.5 hours of 'mixed usage'.
