The BlackBerry Priv, complete with slide-out keyboard.
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"BlackBerry is still around?" That's the most common reaction I get when I show people the "Priv," BlackBerry's first Android phone. It's hard to believe the original iPhone came out more than eight years ago, and only now would we say BlackBerry finally has something that could have competed in the modern smartphone era.
BlackBerry limped along for years with the old-school BlackBerry OS, and the company didn't come out with a revamped smartphone platform until the 2013 release of BlackBerry 10. By then BlackBerry had already lost the ecosystem war, though, and a new platform from a single manufacturer had no chance of gaining a foothold in the app market. Strategy Analytics recently ranked BB10 fifth in worldwide market share behind Android, iOS, Windows, and even Samsung's Tizen—ouch. It's no wonder people are surprised to hear the company still exists.
With the Priv, BlackBerry finally joins the mobile operating system duopoly by jumping into bed with the only major app ecosystem available to third parties: Android. The Priv runs an old version of Android: 5.1.1 Lollipop, the first of many disappointments the Priv will throw our way. Being a BlackBerry, the Priv of course has a hardware keyboard, but the keyboard isn't any good! It's so flat and tiny that it's awful to type on—we greatly preferred the packed in software keyboard. Still, the biggest disappointment is the price: a whopping $700. It's not an unheard of sum for a mobile phone, but build quality issues and a long list of compromises just isn't worth $700.
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