BlackBerry Priv review

Private name, Private number

It’s been over three years since BlackBerry began trickling details about its next generation operating system, a secure environment that would attract developers with its easy-to-use tools, support for open web standards, and an attractive, touch-friendly interface that would boost productivity for millions of people around the world.
Despite modest pickup in some regions, that operating system, BlackBerry 10, failed to gain sufficient market share to turn the company’s handset business profitable. So CEO John Chen did the one thing his predecessors wouldn’t: he followed the crowd.
Welcome to the BlackBerry Priv. It runs Android (Lollipop, to be specific). It has a dual-curved glass screen and a high-density display that hides a thin, responsive physical keyboard underneath. It has a great camera. And according to BlackBerry, it is the most secure Android device you can buy.
This is all great, but a lot of Android phones hit these marks. How BlackBerry differentiates itself from the pack makes the Priv exciting, and one of the best smartphones I’ve used this year. Read on to find out why.

Specs

• Android 5.1.1 Lollipop
• 5.43-inch 2560×1440 pixel Plastic AMOLED display, curved Gorilla Glass 4
• Hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC (2 x 1.8Ghz Cortex-A57 cores, 4 x 1.44Ghz Cortex-A53 cores)
• 3GB LPDDR3 RAM
• 32GB internal storage (expandable via microSD)
• 18MP rear Sony IMX230 sensor, F2.2 lens, w/ OIS, Phase Detection Autofocus
• 4K video capture @ 30fps / 1080p @ 60fps
• 2MP fixed-focus front camera, F2.8 lens, 1.75um pixels
• 720p front video capture @ 30fps
• 3,410mAh battery, Quick Charge 2.0 compatibility
• WiFi (b/g/a/ac/n), Bluetooth 4.1, NFC
• LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 20, 29, 30

About this review

This review was written after a week with the BlackBerry Priv.
For my first four days with the device, the Priv was quite unstable, with regular periods of unresponsiveness and random restarts. BlackBerry then issued a small software update that fixed the majority of these issues.
Throughout my testing period, all of BlackBerry’s core apps, such as the Hub, Camera, Keyboard, and Calendar, were updated twice through the Play Store, with significant feature additions and, most importantly, performance improvements.
It is for this reason that the review you are reading should not be considered a finished product, as I believe BlackBerry will continue to find and fix issues with the Priv’s Android software in the weeks following its release.

Wish fulfillment

The BlackBerry Priv is wish fulfillment, the realization of years of what some BlackBerry loyalists believed was the right direction for the company. Whether it’s too late will be left to the market, but the phone is up to the task to compete with other high-end Android phones.

We start with a 5.43-inch Plastic AMOLED display, covered by curved Gorilla Glass 4. BlackBerry doesn’t have a lot of experience with AMOLED screens — at least not great ones — so the quality here is surprising. Of course, being organic, the pixels contain their own light source, so blacks are infinite and contrast is perfect, but colours were what surprised me. They’re accurate — Samsung accurate.
The whites are greyer than what you’d find on an LCD, and aren’t quite as punchy as the Note 5’s panel, which is the standard by which all AMOLED panels are currently measured, but it’s among the best I’ve seen on a mobile device. And while brightness isn’t fantastic — maximum brightness is about three quarters of the iPhone 6s Plus — it’s still notable for an a Plastic AMOLED panel, which is better known for its thinness and flexibility than its illumination.

Much was made about the Priv’s curvature when it was announced. As of now, though, it isn’t utilized for much, but BlackBerry has given its Android UI a single useful sidebar that can be swiped in from the right curve to access calendar entries, emails, tasks and popular contacts. These are the kind of thoughtful additions to Android peppered through the UI.

The phone’s volume buttons are located on the right side, and include BlackBerry’s well-known play/pause key between. SIM and microSD slots are situated on the phone’s top, while the microUSB port is on the bottom, along with the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Most of BlackBerry’s design decisions with the Priv are sensible, except for the placement of the power button to the left of the display. While it’s possible to turn on the display by double-tapping or engaging the sliding mechanism, I’d have preferred the opposite layout, with the volume buttons to the left of the display and the power button on the right.

The Priv’s design comes across as both honest to BlackBerry’s past and modern, something of which I was doubtful when I first saw leaked renders of the phone. Under the display is an etched array of speaker holes, where one of the phone’s three microphones is located. Despite its Android heritage, BlackBerry still wants the device to be used for phone calls, and for that purpose it sounds rich and full.

Between the edge of the display and that speaker grill is a small lip, used to raise the SmartSlide mechanism, under which the QWERTY keyboard is revealed. The existence of the hardware keyboard represents another notch in BlackBerry’s wish fulfillment narrative: this phone was tailor made for the vocal subset of users begging the Canadian OEM to create what they believed to be the perfect combination of features.

In practice, the keyboard isn’t as good as it could be. Key travel is shallow, owing to the narrow cavity the company had to work with under the display.

The keys themselves are shorter than more dedicated QWERTY devices like the Classic, making it more difficult to touch type with the same accuracy one expects from a traditional BlackBerry product, but I give the company credit for its engineering — that it fit a keyboard of this size under the screen is a marvellous achievement.

That keyboard can also be used as a trackpad, a feature BlackBerry debuted on the Passport. Because Android natively supports a mouse and keyboard input — a little-used feature that goes a long way here — the Priv feels at times like a small laptop, even if its feature set is purposefully more constrained.
The keyboard, for example, can be used to scroll through a Twitter feed or web page, and double-tapping while inputting text activates the cursor, improving Android’s native editing tools. The trackpad isn’t perfect — most apps register with a “natural” scrolling motion, which moves the screen down when you swipe up, but some revert to the regular direction for no specific reason — but it’s useful most of the time.
In fact, I see people using the keyboard more for the trackpad and editing functionality than for typing, since BlackBerry’s virtual keyboard is so good. When the company debuted its virtual keyboard on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha hardware (known at the time as BBX, until a company that owned the copyright threatened legal action), I was amazed at its elegance and maturity, and its Android counterpart retains much of that speed and intelligence.
As on BlackBerry 10, the Priv’s onscreen keyboard displays autocorrect suggestions above individual letters, updating every time another key is pressed. Most of the suggestions are good, but to make it really useful requires the manual addition to the dictionary of oft-mistaken keypresses.

For so long, BlackBerry devices were synonymous with communication and input, but it can be argued that companies like SwiftKey, as well as Apple and Google themselves, have largely solved the virtual keyboard problem. The Priv needs to be more than just an Android device with a keyboard to differentiate itself, especially at its $900 CAD price point.
Thankfully, it excels in other areas. Internally, the phone resembles the LG G4: a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 chip with 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and 32GB of internal storage, which can be expanded through microSD.
After using the phone for a few days, it was clear BlackBerry hadn’t overcome many of Android’s predilections for choppy scrolling and meandering app loading times. A first draft of this section used the words “buggy” and “frustrating” more than once. Then, six days ago, I woke up to a 29 megabyte update that, once installed, fixed the vast majority of those issues.
Subsequent updates through the Play Store to BlackBerry’s core apps saw new features added to the Hub, the Keyboard, Calendar and more, vastly changing the way the device not only performed, but functioned.

As it is today, the Priv’s performance is a mixed bag. Most of the time, it works just as well as the average high-end Android device. The Snapdragon 808 is still a very capable chip, and by no means on its way out; on the Priv, it facilitates the right compromise between in-app performance, gaming prowess and battery life. For what it’s worth, the Priv disappoints in synthetic benchmarks, performing 10 to 15 percent lower than the LG G4 or Moto X Style, both of which use the same chip.
Most of these performance aberrations can probably be chalked up to growing pains, and will likely be rectified in an update BlackBerry says is coming later this month. Until then, you may have to contend with the the random bout of slowdown here and there.
Battery life is an area where the Priv generally outperforms its peers. With a 3,410mAh cell, it’s 14 percent larger than the one found in the Galaxy Note 5, and comparable to that of the Nexus 6P. In real world testing, I found the Priv to last slightly longer than the 6P, making it well into the evening with plenty of time to spare.

In standard battery rundown test, which runs through a series of websites and videos with the screen set to 200 nits of brightness, the Priv managed to stay alive for just over 13 hours, which was comparable to the iPhone 6s Plus and rivalled all other Android devices I’ve tested.
Ultimately, the phone won’t last a full day two days, but it should still be alive the next morning if you forget to plug it in the previous evening.

Along with a phone’s battery life, these days the camera is a likely source of consternation. While the Passport had a great camera app, it failed to consistently capture high-fidelity photos, especially in low light. BlackBerry recognized the Priv’s potential to change the company’s sagging imaging reputation, and took care to ensure its first Android phone provided a memorable photography experience.

Unfortunately, the Priv has the opposite problem to the Passport: its hardware credentials are considerable — an 18MP Sony IMX230 sensor (cropped from its standard 21MP format), an F2.2 lens, optical image stabilization, 4K video capture — but the app loads slowly, and doesn’t have support for manual controls. Worse, BlackBerry doesn’t adhere to Google’s Camera2 API, which means that apps like ProShot and Manual, which provide granular controls to devices that support them, are useless.