You young kids today, with your long music and loud hair! You’re too young to remember how people once typed on their phones—by pressingkeys on a keyboard!
You may not remember the BlackBerry, either—the original smartphone, the one with a really great keyboard that let you type quickly and accurately.
Back in the day, BlackBerry towered over the business world, owning 40 percent of the smartphone market. But BlackBerry missed the touchscreen boat by an intergalactic distance. The stock crashed, thousands were laid off, the two co-CEOs left, the replacement CEO left. These days, BlackBerry sales are probably around 1 part per million.
Today, there’s a new BlackBerry phone called the BlackBerry Priv—a name derived, apparently, from Privacy and Privilege. This new phone ($250 with contract from AT&T, or $700 without contract) comes with an operating system no BlackBerry has ever run before: Android.
It can run, therefore, the hundreds of thousands of Android apps—a welcome change for previous BlackBerry fans who had been stumbling along without the benefit of apps like Netflix and Uber. Android means that that this phone gains the Siri-like wisdom of Google Now. It gets Android’s dictation feature for quick spoken-text entry, which is much better than BlackBerry’s own.
The first Priv runs the Lollipop version of Android; a Marshmallow version is due in January.
But there’s another startling aspect to this phone: It has a concealed, slide-out, physical keyboard, making it the only major Android phone available today with actual typing keys.
Priv in the hand
At nearly 7 ounces, the Priv is heavy—33 percent heavier than, for example, an iPhone 6. And it’s big—big enough to carry a 5.4-inch screen. It’s a little thick, too, although the screen actually curves around the right and left edges like a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+, which helps to disguise the bulk.
(The curved glass doesn’t actually offer any particular features, except for a cool colorful battery “gas gauge” that creeps upward on that edge as the phone charges.)
Despite all of that, plenty of people accept the Priv’s size and shape without ever suspecting that a thumb keyboard slides out from behind, with a satisfying, frictionless ssshhhhpp! and rock-solid, wiggle-free stability: