Using the BlackBerry Priv in 2021 - Review By 91Tech

Blackberry is infamous in the tech community for reasons I likely don't even need to state they initially competed with iPhones and androids, offering a physical keyboard option, which was seen as the superior way to type over a touchscreen, but touchscreens were much more versatile and ultimately won out, leaving blackberry to flounder and die slowly and painfully, but what if you could get the best of both worlds, a full-sized touchscreen and physical keyboard introducing the 2015 blackberry PRI? In my opinion, one of the most interesting android phones ever made with a sliding keyboard that is just way too fun to use hey how's it going. I'm josh from 91 tech, and today we're taking a look at the five-year-old blackberry PRI, it's without a doubt, one of the unique and cool devices ever, but how does it hold up? So many years later, the revolutionary PRI by blackberry combines android and its millions of apps with legendary blackberry security best in market encryption. Technology means that your work is always secured against hackers. PRI has all the features you'd expect in a smartphone, but vastly superior to what you're used to PRI has the best on-screen virtual keyboard experience of any phone blackberry, secure, smartphone powered by android from blackberry, believe it or not. This is actually the first blackberry ever not to run the company's proprietary OS, but instead android it comes with customizations inspired from blackberry phones, and there was a great emphasis on the security feature set. The slogan was even privileged: privacy.

Moving to android was always going to be the right decision for blackberry, albeit a really, really late one. They tried other things. They even worked with Amazon for a little and the fire phone failing actually kind of hurt them because they were hoping the Amazon web store would take off, but yeah they had to move to android, eventually and uh. The truth is they did it too late? The Google Play Store is pretty all-encompassing and not having access to. It is a pretty good reason to avoid a phone like the plague.

If you get an android that doesn't have the Google Play Store, there's not a lot. You can do with it, but this phone has it and it's so darn cool, and it's a real pity that it didn't turn out or do better. The sliding keyboard is pretty clearly the unique aspect of this phone. It works, and it works well as the phone easily and lightly just kind of comes apart at the bottom and magnetically sets to either open or closed up. It doesn't take a lot of effort once you kind of start it is kind of works its own magic and opens up on its own.

The keyboard itself is unique. I definitely am not very good with it yet, but many people still swear by blackberry keyboards, although, interestingly, some critics at the time felt the keyboard actually wasn't as good as previous blackberry devices. Something that's neat is that it's actually capacitive or touch sensitive. So if you're on a scrollable page, you can just lightly touch the keyboard to scroll like you would on a phone, you can also swipe along the home screen using the keyboard. This is a very smart ergonomic idea, as it means, if you already have the keyboard out.

You shouldn't necessarily need to readjust the phone in your hand just to scroll through a webpage or email or something like that, this phone believes it or not, had the potential to be the future of android sure it was limited potential, no doubt, but there was definitely a chance that physical keyboards could catch on again, forcing other phone makers to adjust and again thrusting blackberry to the spotlight. But clearly that didn't happen and in advertising material blackberry was actually as proud of their digital keyboard as the physical one, and I think that was a mistake on their part going all in on the physical keyboard. I think really could have brought back some old users as well as new users who just wanted a unique device. I'm glad it has a digital keyboard. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be forced to use the physical one, but I do think some more emphasis on it and making it a little bigger would have been nice.

The sliding functionality is super cool and way too fun to fidget with. I think that alone could have been a phone seller had they really pushed it, but instead the PRI was just kind of trying to pass as any other android phone just another one among the masses, but clearly uh. This wasn't any ordinary device. So we'll start with the unique aspect, the design this 2015 smartphone really hits every category for being different. As far as 2015 smartphones go most around this time, we're going aluminum a trend, apple kind of kicked off with the 2014 iPhone 6, but the proof doesn't follow this.

Instead, we have a carbon fiber, looking material on the back. They call a tensile weave and it's well. It kind of feels like silicone. I think it's more of a rubbery plastic feeling finish as opposed to a matte one, and while I don't dislike it- and I do think the carbon fiber look is really cool kind of wish. It actually felt like carbon fiber, it's a little disappointing when you first grab it.

Despite there, basically being two separate halves of this phone, it's actually decently thin and comfortable to hold one-handed. You might think it would be. You know really heavy or uncomfortable, but no blackberry did a pretty good job with the design. The button layout on the sides is a bit odd. We have the power button on the left side and on the right.

We have two volume buttons surrounding a smaller, dedicated mystery button. That'll explain soon here, I'm not huge on phones that do stuff like this putting dedicated buttons so close to say the volume buttons, because I can find it can be too easily accidentally pressed I'm just trying to turn the volume up or down and then, of course, there's the question of what this mystery button actually does, and I had to look it up. That's pretty brutal right. You should know just from clicking it, but you don't yeah at first glance. It doesn't seem to do anything, however, when you're actually playing media and press it is'll, mute or unmute it.

So it does have a function. It's just really niche and weirdly hard to figure out. I don't know why they made it this way, but you can change it by going to accessibility, switch access, settings and then map it any way, you'd like to say like a back key, I think even pausing media would have been more useful than a mute regardless it's here, and it's small. So whatever I do love the look of this phone from the back, the feel with the rubbery texture definitely leaves a bit to be desired, but the silver and black just clash to make a really nice aesthetic, and I think it really fits the blackberry brand. The build quality was criticized at launch and I definitely get that but hey at least it looks pretty nice from the back and if it helps at all, it looks even better from the front.

This is an actually gorgeous display and one that was really top of the line for 2015. It's 5.4 inches diagonally, which, if anything, is kind of small nowadays, but we get an OLED panel here with a resolution of 2560x1440 and pixel density of 540 pixels per inch, which is just as impressive as it sounds. You definitely aren't getting ultra-thin bezels by any means here, but the bezels actually have a use case, which I love for years. Androids such as say the 2016 pixel one just slapped on these massive bezels to the top and bottom of the phone without too much point, besides them just being there, but this old blackberry actually has relatively thin ones, and they're useful. We have the selfie camera in the top one, as well as a LED indicator that blinks for notifications and then on the bottom bezel.

You have the speaker, grille and yeah front-facing speakers are always a positive in my books. Actually, what's really kind of neat is. If we slide out the keyboard, we actually get very little bottom bezel to the display itself. Making. This is about as close as you could get to a modern bezel-less phone back in 2015.

Normally I despise companies like Samsung putting their logo on the top bezel, but this is blackberry, and you know what I'm cool with it. How often do you see blackberries nowadays, exactly if I'm using a blackberry, I want to be reminded of it, and I want the world to know too so logo on the top, I'm okay with it another modern commodity on this 2015 phone is the curvature over the edges of the display. That's right! This phone has a curved screen, mind you, the side, bezels are kind of thick, and it isn't a screen that rolls over like say a Galaxy S6 edge, but there is a curve on the screen itself, and we do have this side panel that sits on the right side and can be swiped out. I find it tends to be leggy and inconvenient, but it has some options to see your contacts and go right to your calendar and email or whatever you desire. I have used way too many phones from 2015, and I have to say from the front.

This is one of the more premium ones, but that back with the rubbery feel to it just it's just not great if they had actually done carbon fiber or some kind of matte finish on the back here. I think this would have been one of my favorite designs of all time, but they didn't. Overall, though, this is an interesting and straight up kind of awesome. Looking phone you'd definitely stand out from the crowd with it. If there were crowds right now, and it may just be actually no, let's be real, assuming you're, including the keyboard in the design category.

The design really is the best aspect of this phone. The rest ranges from good to okay at best, but we should get to that. I suppose, let's talk about the camera, a potentially great aspect of the PRI as it's actually 18 megapixels, that's right, 18, whole megapixels, and it has the ability to shoot in 4k at 30 frames per second, the camera is surrounded by a silver bump, with some fancy text inscribed. I really want you to know that this is a fancy. Dance camera with a Schneider crows, knock sensor on the rear yeah.

I know I butchered that name but hey it's my channel. What are you going to do about it? The camera app is pretty typical and this phone does have a micro SD card slot. So you can save quite a few photos if you'd like to we don't get as many options as some android cameras, but I don't really mind that it's not uncommon for camera. Apps to, in my opinion, feel a bit claustrophobic and unwelcoming, especially to new users, but we can mess with the basic settings, at least as well as resolution and aspect ratio. I do get some lag in this app sometimes and that's quite annoying, but it's not something.

I've found unique to this phone. Actual photos are well. You can see here, they're fine, they're, not bad they're, about what you would want from a 2015 phone I'd say it actually holds its own pretty. Well, I know in the past, blackberry had been known for pretty mediocre cameras, but this one. Actually it's fine.

It's definitely a 2015 smartphone camera. Don't get me wrong, and I'm not exactly a photography expert, the colors look pretty decent HDR for the most part is okay, although some shots, it's definitely pretty bad, and you know it's fairly crisp. It's just it's a 2015 camera. What do you expect video again can be taken in 4k, which you can see here? It's well, it technically is 4k, but I wouldn't call it a great 4k. I mean it's a 2015 phone, so I think it exceeds expectations with the age in mind.

It isn't bad and the ability to record in a high resolution is appreciated. The front-facing camera on this phone is a stark contrast to the other sensors in that it's not okay, but it's really, really bad. It's 2 megapixels and takes photos like they were taken with a 2, megapixel camera. It also only films in 720p, fairly disappointing for a 2015 phone. Although for skype or whatever you'd be using on an android in 2015, I suppose it would do the job.

So the camera is fine, if not maybe good, definitely not the best, but also a lot better than the worst. And it's not really super fair to compare this phone to modern phones anymore, as smartphone tech when it comes to the camera, has really improved in the last five years. Okay enough about the camera. Let's talk about the keyboard, but not that one! That's right! This phone has a digital keyboard and while this might be considered blasphemy, I'm finding it much better than the physical one. I'm just super used to digital keyboards, and it's also helped that the buttons on it are actually quite large making it easy to use.

This is a pretty good keyboard, the physical one, I'm not a fan, I get it actual keyboards are cool and if you were a die-hard blackberry user back in the day, maybe this would be useful, but for me, I find myself constantly pressing the wrong buttons and just completely unable to consistently type on it. It's just too small and cramped. I do, however, really love sliding it in and out it's super cool. I don't know how many times I have to say that, but like this phone is so cool. Unfortunately, I think that this is an important point.

Physical keyboards, just don't have any place on smartphones anymore. People have moved on and slapping it onto an android and calling it a blackberry makes for a unique and eye-catching phone, but not one people actually want to use, or at least most people. This is a gimmick at heart, but hey it's a really awesome, gimmick and one way too much fun to play around with, although, as you might have figured out, it does mean no water resistance. Definitely wouldn't want to drop this thing into the toilet. There's also no fingerprint sensor, which is something I really dislike.

I mean the iPhone 5s from 2013. Had it and most android makers had jumped on board by 2015. It feels so redundant to type in a passcode frequently. Nowadays. I think that really holds it back for me in terms of trying to use it regularly.

What's kind of funny to me is when I was researching the lack of fingerprint sensor for this phone when I was writing the script, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread where people were defending blackberry for not including a fingerprint sensor, because biometrics apparently aren't as secure as an actual pin code I mean, so they were actually arguing that it's more likely for someone to get your fingerprint than it is your passcode. Okay, assuming that's even true. What are the odds someone's going to get your fingerprint. Why would anyone get your fingerprint? Are you really that that concerned about your privacy? Look privacy is important, but if someone chopped off my head so that they could use face ID on my iPhone 12. , you know what they don't even have to do the chopping I'll, I'll look at the phone for them, so they can get in.

I get the whole idea of privacy, and I know blackberry was really emphasizing that part, but seriously. What do you have to hide? That's so sensitive somebody would go to the lengths of getting your fingerprint, potentially just taking a finger to actually get in the phone. Besides, even if there was a fingerprint sensor on here, you don't have to use it. You could go passcode only right now on an iPhone. You don't have to use face ID if you don't want to or touch ID or whatever.

Anyway. Sorry, maybe a bit of a tangent but Reddit's hilarious, and I just thought it was super, super dumb. I've definitely lost brain cells from breeding that thread. At least the battery on this phone is pretty big at 3 410 William hours. That's not huge for a phone five years later, but it was pretty good for 2015, and while I've read this phone, it's considered kind of heavy for some people it doesn't feel too bad for me, probably heavier than average, but not annoying by any means.

It'd likely be pretty bulky with a thick case, although a case with a physical keyboard might be annoying anyways. I'd say all in all battery life has been average. For me, I think it would probably be okay with a decent amount of use and charging at nightly, of course, because this phone is 5 years old. Depending on how much it's been used over the years, the battery life is going to vary greatly device to device. Something.

That's neat, though, is that there's a battery indicator on the right edge of the display when you plug it in there's a green line and percentage showing just how much the phone has charged. I like this a lot, and it's not dissimilar to an always on display. I mean it isn't always on display. Furthermore, I guess the only thing is I do wish. There was maybe a clock or something as well.

The hardware so far has been kind of hit or miss. For me, the design is good, but not great. The keyboard is cool, but gimmicky. The camera is fine, the screen's actually pretty darn good and then there's the technical specs, which are bad. Well.

Okay, not very good. How about that? We've got the snapdragon, 808, processor and three gigabytes of ram. These are pretty typical specs for an android phone five years ago, but real life performance is lacking even reviews at the time criticized it for experiencing a large amount of lag and freeze-ups, despite the average internals. I think this mostly comes down to unoptimized software. We have 32 gigabytes of internal storage, which is good and of course again there is a micro SD support the space isn't an issue here.

What is an issue is how old the software is. Originally the PRI came out on android 5 lollipops, but have no worries. It got a single update in android marshmallow and that's it in fact. Right now it's only running android 6.0.1, which shows just how little blackberry bothered keeping the PRI relevant. I get that it didn't sell very well mostly due to its high price, despite lagging behind competitors in the same bracket, but keeping old devices updated for in the very least, a couple of years shows at least some modicum of dedication, but blackberry clearly was ready to move on quickly, leaving us with a very old feeling, android experience.

I also don't think, there's much of a community in terms of custom ROMs either. So, if there's any way to flash this thing, I don't know it, and I'm sure it's a lot of trouble to go to. This is likely partly due to how blackberry wanted to lock their phones down privacy, wise, a nice gesture, but one that can annoy years later when the phone is no longer relevant and people want to mess with it mind you, I don't think you'd want this phone to go past android 6, because it's already kind of slow, the snapdragon 808 just doesn't hold up anymore and modern tasks on here can feel like a chore more than anything else, it does work for basic things, but you're giving up a lot of going to an old smartphone like this, and it's just not going to be a pleasant experience. The only reason to use this thing anymore is the form factor that physical keyboard is really cool, and the sliding is awesome. It's just, unfortunately, packaged with a smartphone.

I can safely call obsolete or in the very least old, because it can still do stuff. Blackberry did really like talking about privacy with this phone, so I should probably go over that, although it's not a terribly fascinating subject, I think it's a bit of a mistake for phone makers to really go further than say we are good at privacy. Kind of like Apple does because most people as much as they say they like keeping their privacy, will use public, Wi-Fi, nonchalantly and, in truth not really knowing or caring just how much information, google and advertisers actually have on them. Most people don't care, they just love the illusion that they have their privacy. That might be kind of cynical, but it's true.

You tell someone your app has good privacy and that's probably enough for them, but maybe you're a businessman, and you just love doing business things, and so you want to keep your phone private for real. After all, blackberries are for business people right blackberry did lock down the software and hardware as much as they could and also allow you to control various privacy settings via the detect by blackberry, app. They definitely did put effort into this. The due app is kind of cool. It shows your device security status and offers suggestions on how you can make it more secure.

I think this is actually pretty smart. It's a pretty basic, easy way to understand how secure your phone is and that isn't hurting anything. I could see it being useful for some people. Blackberry also has some of their own apps on here, because it wouldn't be a third-party android phone without some bloat now I'll give them a lot of credit here. This is actually stock.

Android 6, which I appreciate just with a few pre-installed applications. The most intriguing of them is blackberry hub, which I'll come back to, because when I was writing my script for this uh, the blackberry decided to suddenly boot loop yeah. I don't know what happened. You can see my Instagram story here. It did this for about three minutes and then suddenly it came back, and it was fine okay.

So what happened here, and thanks to Hugh Jefferies for actually pointing this out to me? He uh he used the blackberry PRI for a while, and I believe right now is using the key one, but he let me know that in order to have a smooth experience, you need to disable blackberry hub and services. Pretty bad blackberry isn't supporting this thing properly and even worse, that you need to manually turn off their services to fix things, but anyways blackberry hub. It's an app used to sync and manage all of your communications in one place. Any social media emails text, you name it all in one app wait. Haven't I heard of this before wolf is the site that I'm launching to be the last word in social networking for just 12.99 a month? Wolf links up all your communication portals, so you are always within reach. It's part of the ROG pack, as I call it, but look why tell you when I can show you? I just sent myself a woof Ryan you've, a wolf online one.

Thank you, Aaron woof! Well, it isn't exactly the same thing, but it's a similar concept and I mean it's kind of cool in theory, but not something I personally would ever want to use and then, of course, there's blackberry messenger which has since shut down BBM offered encrypted messaging. However, upon trying to load it up, my blackberry PRI just gets an infinite loading screen. Okay. I know I've talked about the hardware quite a bit already, but I just noticed when I press hard on the screen. I actually get like a creaking because of kind of how the back is hollow there, probably, but it's really annoying listen to this, I'm just pushing on the screen.

Can you hear that, like I'm not even applying that much pressure here, I'm just basically tapping it? It creaks! That's annoying! That's really annoying. That would be super annoying in daily use. That's the thing about this phone. It just doesn't feel polished. You know it sucks, because this phone's so cool, but it just- doesn't hit the mark for me but anyways getting back on script uh.

There isn't a lot of pre-installed apps again, and I do like that a lot. Nothing drives me crazier than an android phone with two versions of every app Samsung cough. It's confusing and unnecessary. Google's apps are fine, as is, and they don't need to be remade. Stock.

Android 6 is a blessing, but we're on what android, 11 now and android 12 will be just around the corner, at least in beta form, so safe to say this thing's pretty darn, outdated, now sure the basics work and with android marshmallow, you can still download a majority of apps right now, but they can still be hit-and-miss among us was working fine for me, though, so there's that now you can call everybody SUS with your blackberry keyboard. Actually, this app, I think, shows where that keyboard could have been utilized better. Had the proof. Actually, you know, sold well and been optimized properly. So right now you can see I'm using the joystick on the left side, but imagine if we hold out the keyboard and then use the keyboard as the joystick and thus have the entire screen clear of my thumbs.

I don't know just an idea- and I think just another way to show the potential here and man the potential, this phone just drips of potential. If there's one thing I'd put on the gravestone of the blackberry PRI, it would be the word potential. The blackberry PRI is all in all just a painfully mediocre device. If even that, I hate to call it bad or even mediocre, because, honestly I love this phone so much it's so cool and when I show it to somebody they find it super cool too. It's not just me.

I know it's not just me. The potential is here. It really is. If the keys on the keyboard were a bit larger and easy to go to from a digital keyboard, and there was some form of biometrics and better tech, specs and software optimization, and you know actual updates. Ah, what could have been, but instead the PRI died as quickly as it arose and was soon replaced by blackberry's next Frankenstein of their old ways.

The key one and well, if anything, I'd say the key one was probably worse. I think it looks nice, but forcing the physical keyboard on users just probably isn't the right solution. A digital keyboard makes sense because it disappears giving you just that much more screen real estate. The blackberry PRI, is as close as blackberry will ever make to a comeback, at least in my opinion, and had it come a couple of years earlier or had maybe built on it instead of ditching it all together. Who knows the potential of the blackberry proof is overwhelming, but unfortunately it fell short, but hey five years later, we can look at this phone as a unique, interesting piece of smartphone history, and I'll continue.

Sliding the keyboard in and out for days and days to keep myself entertained seriously. This is really, really enjoyable. I probably could do this all day and not get tired of it. You know what else I could do all day plug my Twitter and Instagram at 91 underscore tech. You should go, follow it also the 91 tech discord channel come by say: hi.

We've got a great community over there. If you couldn't tell I'm pretty much done with this video, it's been a lot of fun looking at the PRI, and it wasn't too expensive for me to pick up off eBay. It cost me about 100 bucks us which, for a 2015, somewhat obscure phone, I can live with. You. Definitely probably shouldn't buy one with the idea of using it, but if you want one just to have it and show it off honestly I'd say it's worth it that keyboard there's really just no other phone like it, and I really appreciate the blackberry PRI.

It's awesome for all its flaws, frozen, mediocre as it is, it's a cool phone and at the end of the day, any phone from 2015 isn't going to be that good anymore. So you know what at least this one stands out. If you found this video interesting or helpful, maybe hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content. Just like this again, you can follow me over on Twitter and Instagram at 91. Underscore tech, please I beg of you and without being said, thank you so much for watching I'm josh from 91 tech, and I will see you all next time: hey how's it going I'm josh from 91 tech, and today we're taking a look at the upside down, five-year-old blackberry proof, but, okay enough about the camera.

Let's talk about the keyboard um. You know what they deserve to be able to get into it, heck I'll chop off my head for them. Wait! That's not what I meant.

Source : 91Tech