If the ads pointing to a Friday pre-order date for the Priv didn’t have you salivating already, things are starting to heat up. BlackBerry is now listing the Priv on ShopBlackBerry, and although you can’t pre-order just yet, we now have a good look at pricing. For those of us in the U.S., it looks like the BlackBerry Priv is running a cool $750 unlocked. In Canada, on the other hand, it’ll set you back $949 – definitely a pricey little beast. In addition, we’re looking at a ship date of November 16 after pre-orders begin.
I like the Priv – finally a modern phone with a proper keyboard – but that is one hefty price tag. I think this kills a lot of the possible, albeit modest, success.
Having a cellphone more expensive than a full-blown computer is a big non-sense.
Yeah for $750 it should come with a 24″ screen, decent PCIe graphics, and 5.1 surround sound speakers.
🙂
On the lower end you can build a PC with an AMD APU that has decent but not great graphics for about $200 or like $240 with a decent SSD.
You can go pretty cheap and small without the requirement for a dedicated GPU. The “windows tax” hits pretty hard at that price range though. If you don’t need Windows and just need a browser to surf a $150 chromebox will do.
I can understand why so many companies would rather be making $600 – $750 mobile phones. You can buy previous year snapdragon chips for about $17 but with mobile there is a MUCH bigger push to have the latest/fastest available technology than with desktops.
It just kind of sucks that all the innovation/progress is now happening mostly on platforms that are essentially proprietary from a hardware perspective.
This price is in line with the likes of the Samsung S6 and iPhone 6s and their selling just fine. Not many people will buy it unlocked anyway but on contract, alleviating a great deal of the costs. I still think the Priv will sell incredibly well. I’m definitely getting one that’s for sure, unlocked as well. I paid over 800 dollars for my iPhone 6, which I absolutely hated so spending 50 dollars less on a much superior phone won’t be a problem for me. Why did I hate the iPhone.
1. I could not select my own default apps or assign file extensions to a default app. Since I don’t want to use a single Apple app I had a real problem with what can only be called blatant anti-competitive behavior.
2. The way iOS handles files is just absurd, forcing the apps to manage their own files is simple lazy programing. Searching for multiple files created by multiple apps is a non-existent feature. No file-manager with built in cloud support or zip capabilities. The list just goes on and on about the problems I had with file management.
3. I had to log into iCloud over 40 times, seriously iOS has got to have the worst inner app communication of any mobile OS on the market. With my Android phones I logged in once, upon the intial setup of the phone from that point on any app that supported Google Drive all I had to do was select accept authorization.
4. Multitasking, though people keep saying that iOS 9 hasimproved it greatly, I just don’t see it. I think their mistaking multitasking with app switching. I’m talking about running multiple apps at once, most importantly a terminal. As a programmer I depend greatly on a terminal connecting to multiple servers from my firm. Running scripts, monitoring trades, even compiling jobs. Though with iOS it was impossible to run these sort of tasks in the background because the system would terminate the connections after a short period of time. Streaming movies to my TV, yes iOS allowed such activities but that was it, everytime I switched from over to another app, like the browser, the movie would stop, huh, I can’t watch a movie and surf at the same time. My Nokia E7 from 2010 was able to do that, simple ridiculous.
I’ll end it here as it’s starting to get long but I mentioned these points to show you that the Priv has a place in the market. Those looking for a power phone will be extremely happy, security, full multitasking, mechanical keyboard, curved display, SD Card, powerfully CPU/GPU, ample RAM, great build quality, etc. Why would anyone think that this was worth less than an iPhone 6s or Samsung S6.
Edited 2015-10-23 21:02 UTC
The price is irrelevant because the target market is corporations (particularly financial institutions).
Actually, that means the price is extremely relevant because these corporations got used to “bring your own device” where the employeed pays for the phone and the company picks up the phonebill.
The amount of employees that would buy this phone by themselves is close to 0.
From the article I cannot see it it would run BlackBerry OS or Android, but i don’t know of any company that has standardized on the new BlackBerries. It is either:
1) Bring your own
2) Popular iOS
3) Cheap Android
4) Corporate Windows Phone
BlackBerry has given themselves basically unreachable targets. They are only bringing out high-end expensive phones and they set a goal to double their current amount of sales while their trend is “nosedive”.
They are setting themselves up to fail (on the hardware side) but at least these devices will make them some margin (not volume though)
My company like many others once had a policy of “you can pick any company phone as long as it’s blackberry”. Even after Android/iPhone it took them a while to support the new devices and while it didn’t happen overnight they have been supporting Android/iPhones for years. The policies and software have had a few changes along the way since even and blackberry is all but a remember-when story.
Some companies were even slower, and there might be a few corporate or government holdouts still kicking but at this point they have to be extremely few and far between. They had the opportunity to try to leverage a lot of existing business agreements with a device like this but that window has come and gone in my opinion.
Even with keyboards when people first moved to Androids seeing Moto Droids with keyboards was a popular choice for a lot of people in my company but now even the Droid no longer has a keyboard as the software keyboards like Swype have improved typing immensely.
I think people nostalgia for blackberry for the same reason we nostalgia over older games but when we play them it’s “I don’t remember the graphics being this bad”
I had a Blackberry Perl and I remember typing on it came with a decent learning curve and I hated it. I handed my phone to about 6 people at different times and asked them to type a simple word like “Jim” and I don’t think any of them succeeded. Many times they ended up with a construct that didn’t have any of the same letters. It was ages ago but I think I had to switch from SureType to multi-tap just to make it usable even if just slowly.
I’m sure some people still want hardware keys but I find Swype to be pretty much amazing in comparison. I think they are 7-8 years too late with the product and they probably won’t sell enough of them to cover their R&D costs.
I might consider a $750 phone that comes with an amazing camera or has amazing battery life but for a physical keyboard on a phone in 2015? Naw.
Not only would few people be interested I think the number of people who prefer a physical keyboard is actually falling. If you don’t want to type at all you tap the microphone and dictate with speech to text which also works pretty well these days.
I have been literally counting the days until I could buy this phone for two months. They announced the price and I took myself off the buyer list. Now I have no idea what my next phone is going to be. My current one is failing so I cannot wait for either a price drop or a follow-up model.
I still have an LG Mach LS860. It’s got a full slider qwerty keyboard, and was one of the last Android smartphones to come with one. I was on board with this as well. I wanted this new phone. I need the keyboard. Now I’m going to have to wait another year, for this model to get replaced with a newer version (dropping its price) or for the phone to fail entirely, causing them to slash the price. I will have my qwerty smartphone!
EDIT –
I may just have to settle for an LG Enact…
http://www.lg.com/us/cell-phones/lg-VS890-enact
Edited 2015-10-23 14:00 UTC
I desperately wanted this phone. My Q10 had finally reached EOL and needs replacing. At this price there is no way I can justify it, so have had to plumb for an alternative. This is incredibly annoying, because for the first time in Years a phone ticked every item on my requirements list. I also have a feeling that as it won’t be the most popular phone, the ebay prices won’t drop into range for quite a while
I’m in the UK and have never ever bought a phone outright, i just look for the monthly contract payment. Once i’m out of contract, i look for another phone with a new contract. Probably pay the same cost over 2 years but i get all my phone calls, texts and data thrown into that cost.
I am not in the UK, and in my country (Bolivia), getting a cellphone from a carrier is by far more expensive; so we people prefer to buy something unlocked, and, in such case, the price IS relevant.
I really hope Blackberry succeeds with this business model of hardened Android, but it won’t be overnight. So let’s be realistic: this phone will be selling for $549 within a few months, and maybe then it will matter if BB can update it to Marshmallow in a reasonable timeframe.
If BB churns out updates responsibly and continues to make quality ultra-secure handsets, they will find a market. But not at $800 a phone. You can’t ask Apple prices until you do Apple kinds of things, and you can’t compete with Samsung, LG, and HTC while they’re racing to the bottom with $400-$500 unlocked flagships. They gotta find the middle ground at least.
Welcome to the new nokia x \o/
Good bye blackberry, we’ll miss you, like nokia…..
(before downvote, I was waiting for this device, with bb10, but since Chenelop decided to go full nokia, Never go full nokia)