It took BlackBerry a lot of time to see the writing on the wall: that it needed to start making Android-powered smartphones if it wanted to stay alive in the very tough global smartphone market. It launched its first Android smartphone earlier this year and many believe that it’s too little and too late. Nevertheless the company continues to focus on everything that’s good about the Priv and has even released a new video which shows us how the Priv is actually built.
Many have praised the Priv’s design, it features the signature robust BlackBerry build as well as the company’s iconic full QWERTY keyboard. Sliders are no longer common and yet BlackBerry decided that the Priv was going to have a sliding mechanism and it coupled that with flagship-level specs to come up with a device that’s unlike anything it has ever made before.
Customers have responded but perhaps not in the way BlackBerry would have liked them to. The company recently confirmed that only 700,000 units of the Priv were sold in Q3 2015, sales were lower than expected, and perhaps that’s one big reason why BlackBerry is now considering a price cut come February 2016.
It’s going to continue operating the hype machine to get more and more people to switch to its first Android handset, perhaps if people see how the Priv is built they would be interested enough to check it out. If everything goes as planned then the company does intend to release another Android powered smartphone by mid-2016.