A global leader in secure mobile communications, Blackberry Limited on Friday announced that the PRIV™ by BlackBerry® would be available in Nigeria on Saturday, February 13 2016. Nigeria is Africa’s largest smartphone market and the company’s largest market in the sub-Saharan Africa while the PRIV is the first-ever BlackBerry smartphone powered by Android.

When Blackberry announced that its Blackberry messenger was going to be available on android phones in 2013 people thought it could be the end of Blackberry. This was because phones running on android apps had unique features that were not available for blackberry phones and having blackberry on android would be “bad market” for blackberry. According to blackberry, in the three months ending November 28, 2015, BlackBerry reported global revenue of $548 million, up 11.8 percent from the previous quarter. This marked the first time in two years that the company reported two consecutive quarters of increasing revenue.

However the announcement of the launch of the blackberry PRIV is a sigh of relief for Nigerians who have been longing to buy a blackberry phone which runs on  android app.

In case you don’t know about the Blackberry PRIV, here are 10 unique features of the phone:

  1. Full Android App and Ecosystem Experience– PRIV brings incredible new features to the Android platform and gives users full access to over one million applications.
  1. Best of Both Keyboards– offers the freedom to choose between a virtual keyboard or a physical keyboard for speed and accuracy.
  1. Tough and Beautiful Screen– A stunning 5.4-inch immersive dual-curve OLED display offers plenty of room to work or play with rich colours, deep black levels and less power consumption. At a resolution of 2560×1440, it sports an incredible pixel density of 540 PPI – 4x the amount of pixels of a standard HDTV.
  1. Battery Life– PRIV has a 3410 mAh battery with enough power to work up to 22.5 straight hours of mixed usage.
  1. State-of-the-Art Camera– Engineered to deliver professional looking photos with minimal effort, an 18MP camera, certified by Schneider-Kreuznach®, integrates technologies commonly found in DSLR cameras.
  1. Powerful Performance and Expandable Storage– PRIV is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, a premium-tier chipset designed to offer consumers a superior and compelling user experience along with peace of mind. It has 32 GB of onboard storage and support for micro SD cards up to 2TB. 
  1. BlackBerry® Natural Sound– PRIV comes with powerful speakers and a three-microphone system that delivers a high-quality listening experience. BlackBerry® Natural Sound Technology is built in to adapt Wi-Fi and cellular call sound depending upon phone position and background noise, automatically adjusting volume so users don’t have to.
  1. Advanced Privacy Controls: The exclusive DTEK™ by BlackBerry® app for Android™ monitors and reports on application access to the microphone, camera, location and personal information, enabling users to be confident that their personal data is being kept private. Users can know at a glance when their privacy could be at risk so they can take action to improve it.
  1. Secure Hardware: BlackBerry’s hardware root of trust, a unique manufacturing process, injects cryptographic keys into the device hardware, providing a secure foundation for the entire platform.
  1. Verified Boot and Secure Bootchain: Keys have been embedded to verify every layer of the device from hardware to OS to applications in order to make sure they haven’t been tampered with. Additionally, thousands of modifications were made to harden the Linux kernel with numerous patches and configuration changes to improve security.

See video of the blackberry PRIV below:

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