14 DAY TRIAL // BlackBerry India has been teasing the upcoming availability of the PRIV for a few days now. Today, the company confirmed that the Android smartphone would be available for purchase in India starting January 30.
That's the good news. The bad news is BlackBerry PRIV won't come cheap. According to the Canadian company, the smartphone will be available for purchase via Amazon India for no less than Rs 62,990 outright, which is about $925 or €845.
Considering the BlackBerry PRIV costs no more than $800 in just about any other country, it begs the question why the Canadian company has decided to overprice its Android smartphone in an emerging country.
Not to mention that BlackBerry aims to sell quite a few PRIVs to make its mobile division profitable again. A much lower price would have helped with sales a lot, especially that India is a pretty big market.
Hopefully, the PRIV's price will drop soon after launch, even though not by much. Otherwise, BlackBerry won't sell to many Android smartphones in this country.
BlackBerry confirmed it would launch the PRIV in 31 countries this year, and the rollout of the smartphone has already begun. Many European countries already got the smartphone, but the PRIV also landed at additional US carriers (T-Mobile).
The specs
For those who want to try out BlackBerry's Android smartphone, here are the main features you might be excited for.
The PRIV sports a 5.4-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display that supports Quad HD (2560 x 1440 pixels) resolution and features Corning Gorilla Glass 4 coating.
The smartphone is powered by a 1.8GHz hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, coupled with an Adreno 418 graphics processing unit, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory that can be expanded up to 2TB via microSD card slot.
BlackBerry PRIV packs an 18-megapixel rear-facing camera with phase detection autofocus, dual-LED flash, OIS (optical image stabilization), and 4K video recording.
Also, for more in-depth details on the Android smartphone, you can check out our full BlackBerry PRIV review.
