Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Blackberry Priv Review!”.
Hey what is up guys so blackberry doesn’t make that many phones anymore, but this is the newest one. It’S called the BlackBerry Prive. This is a smartphone made by blackberry right, but it runs Android. I said before it would take a lot for me to actually review a blackberry, but this one this one’s actually not bad, no seriously, it’s not bad at all, so right off the top for a blackberry. This phone is quite nice.
It’S my favorite blackberry ever, but in the vast array of smartphones out now I’d say it’s pretty middle-of-the-road average. First of all, with the build, it’s got the quite a few things going for it. Obviously it’s a vertical slider, so that’s pretty unique as far as smartphones go, but when the keyboard is closed, it’s actually pretty clean. The carbon fiber look all the way around the body, the squared off top and bottom, and the texture.
The material itself is actually really grippy, both on the back and on the rails on the sides too. So this is the phone that does not need a skin or case. It’S never slid out of my pocket once never slid off a desk. It’S probably the most secure feeling phone I’ve ever held.
It’S got the power button on the left and the trio of buttons on the right, so volume up, volume down and the toggle for volume control reminds me of other blackberries and there’s also a front facing speaker. Actually, on the bottom too, now it’s really barely an average speaker is pretty weak as far as quality goes, but it’s facing the user. So it’s still better than anything, rear-facing and then right above that speaker is a lip for you to grab the keyboard and that’s where you can slide it open and close with one hand, and I got used to this motion in a matter of minutes and then Over the course of weeks of using the device, it felt correct pretty quickly the spring mechanism for opening it is solid, feels durable and confident when the phone is open and it actually feels more balanced when it’s open when the weight is spread out more, it doesn’t Feel top-heavy at all my only complaint with the build is the thin back cover material I feel like, since it’s sealed in phone, you could use whatever material you want, but the back just feels soft and thin and kind of flexes now on paper again, this is The best blackberry ever snapdragon 808 chip, two gigabytes of ram 32 gigs of internal storage, but that’s also expandable. Inside a 3410 milliamp hour battery with wireless charging and quick charging and a 5.4 inch quad HD AMOLED display with slightly curved edges on both sides.
Now, among the other top smartphones, it’s kind of sitting, mid high-end, but still refreshing to see this in a Blackberry, so the battery life I got was meh decent, like b-minus territory. I was getting barely three hours of screen on time and the screen itself is pretty good, not the best quad HD AMOLED display I’ve seen which is sort of a weird statement to make now. But it’s true and it’s still plenty sharp but could be brighter and a bit more saturated, but it’s a quality panel and all of this under all the BlackBerry logos and hardware, it runs android 5.1 under the hood and it’s actually pretty close to stock android. I wouldn’t really call it a skin more of a vanilla Android with a bunch of blackberry, enhancements and added features thrown in kind of like what Motorola does with their Moto X, and this is kind of where blackberry goes to town.
They added a ton of stuff mixing in classic older blackberry features with new stuff and Android, so you can swipe up from the bottom to not just get Google now, but also blackberry device, search and blackberry hub. I found Google now does a pretty good job of searching the device anyway, but I didn’t use blackberry hub that much because it’s sort of overwhelming it’s a collection of all of your notifications from email and Twitter etc. Everything shows up there. You can also use icon packs from the Play Store in the custom launcher. It’S not Google launcher, but it’s very similar plus this feature, and it also has a feature called pop-up widgets, which lets you swipe up from certain icons on your homescreen to just show their widgets, and this is already sort of a feature in some other third-party Android Launchers, but hey it’s built in now here and it’s occasionally pretty useful, especially I guess for music and media apps, there’s also a redesigned slightly crazy-looking multitasking tray with like different apps of different sizes, not sure why, but that’s the way it is, and you also now Have double tap to wake but no double tap to sleep.
I always say this: I think every phone that has the option to double tap to wake should also let you double tap to sleep. It also sorts your notifications in the tray, so you can target certain apps when you have multiple notifications from apps and over here on. The side of your curved display is, what’s called the productivity tab you swipe in from the side kind of like the tab on the Galaxy s6 edge, and it shows full screen calendar events, contacts tasks, all sorts of stuff.
I kind of wish I could throw in some app shortcuts in there, but that would take a software update. It also throws in this sweet charging indicator and ambient display, since it’s an AMOLED display, and you can do things without using much battery and pretty much all these new additions are pretty intuitive and clean and easy to figure out. What’S weird, though, is that, despite that, pretty solid set of specs, we talked about this, guy has more hitches than a normal Android phone. I found animations slowing down a bit and dropping a little frames more than I’d want to see out of the Snapdragon 808 device, especially when multitasking and web browsing and switching between a bunch of stuff. It’S funny because gaming and intense stuff was perfectly fine. Graphics held up and it didn’t drop any frames.
Everything was totally smooth, but for some reason the quicker lighter stuff actually took some hits and it definitely got warm they never overheated or anything, but I could definitely feel it in that fin back after extended use. Now I’m sure software updates, including an update to marshmallow, hopefully, will fix a lot of these issues and even extend battery life a bit with those. But for now that’s my experience and then, since it is a Blackberry. After all, there’s a little focus on the keyboard and the typing experience, so the software keyboard is pretty good, but if you don’t like it like, I didn’t you can replace it with the Google keyboard or anything else. If you want it’s Android and the hardware keyboard is alright, I’m personally not a huge fan and look. I like hardware keyboards.
I started off my smartphone career with the Moto droid. That thing had an awesome keyboard, but the keys were a lot bigger. This blackberry Prive is a vertical slider and all the keys feel tiny and very close together. A little too close for my fingers, but I understand not everyone’s hands are huge, so here are some tricks for people who will really use this physical keyboard.
So you can swipe left to delete one word at a time. So if you made a typo or something and you just want to delete it, you get the satisfying gesture to get rid of words. And then, if you want to be a little more precise, you can double tap to enter cursor mode and that’s just a little little touch on the keyboard. It’S not actually pressing keys.
Then it acts like a touchpad. You can actually move around to choose where you want to type, and this touchpad behavior can work in other apps too, so you can scroll through Twitter or Phoenix or Instagram or Chrome or whatever just by swiping along the top of the keyboard, which is pretty cool. Might seem like a gimmick at first, but all this stuff works really well to keep your fingers off the display, so you can see the whole display while you’re using it.
Alright. Last thing in touch on with this Prive is the camera on the back, probably less important on a blackberry but continuing on the theme it’s better than any other blackberry camera. But it’s really nothing special. It’S an 18 megapixel shooter with oh, is, and the dual LED flash on the back and it’s capable of some pretty mediocre. Looking for K, video and the photos it takes. It has this really steep quality curve from high light to low light in high light.
The photos, look, fine, nice and sharp and detailed and have accurate color, not a whole lot of dynamic range and highlights do blow out all the time. But it looks fine, but then very quickly, once you start to lose light, the photos get way worse and every smartphone camera suffers in low-light, but yeah. This one really takes a hit.
You get plenty of noise and artifacts and processing just looks a little out of whack here. The camera app itself is really clean, nothing wrong with it, except that it’s really slow to actually take a photo. Why is there that much shutter lag? I like that. I have exposure control with a neat little slider down there at the bottom, but yeah the camera app needs an update for a lot of these things to be fixed, oh and the front-facing 2-megapixel camera is a joke. So what do we learn with this phone? Well, BlackBerry has a whole bunch of good ideas, lots of productivity tricks and neat shortcuts, and things like that, but not enough to win me over personally, I used it kind of like a normal Android phone, not a premium blackberry, and it was just alright.
You might like it, but I think I’ll wait for the prove too thanks for watching and I’ll talk to you guys, the next one peace you .