Blackphone, a surveillance-proof smartphone from Silent Circle in joint venture with SGP Technologies aka Geeksphone, has made its way to the market with a price tag of $629.
The company claimed that the first batch of its production of the Blackphone is already sold out and that it has started shipping the devices from Monday. The device will be available for ordering starting 14 July on the website.
After the revelations by Edward Snowden about the NSA eavesdropping on people’s conversations, Silent Circle proposed a device which can prevent such surveillance activities from tapping information.
Blackphone comes preloaded with several custom made apps and also features end-to-end encryption facilities for call and text message, along with Wi-Fi protection, VPN access, private cloud storage, etc. The security apps and features come with a free 24 month subscription summing up to $700, which also includes Silent Circle’s internally developed mobile security suite.
The device sports a 4.7-inch IPS HD 720p display and is powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 4i quad-core 2GHz processor. Blackphone offers 1GB of RAM and has built-in storage of up to 16GB which can be further extended up to 128GB with the help of microSD card slot.
The device features an 8-megapixel main camera with LED flash and a 5-megapixel front facing camera. Blackphone, measuring 141 x 69 x 9mm and tipping the scales at 119 grams, runs a customized version of Android KitKat oriented to security, referred to as PrivatOS.
The phones will be available unlocked and users can use them on any network. The device’s features lets users to mask information and block apps which try to access private information stored on the phone.
