For those figuring Father's Day deals out, BlackBerry has an alternative to fattening tie collections. BlackBerry's Android-powered Priv is on offer for $550 for Father's Day — that's $100 off regular retail.
For those interested in picking up a discounted Priv, or at least adding it to a short list of gift ideas, head over to the BlackBerry website to check it out. It may not be the very best Android phone out there, but the Priv has character and muscle.
A throwback to BlackBerry's early days, the Priv comes with a slide-out hardware keyboard for those who crave feedback from the buttons they press.
The Priv boasts a 5.4-inch, dual-curved display that puts out an Ultra HD resolution of 2,560 x 1,440, delivering a concentration of 540 dots per inch. That AMOLED screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4.
The smartphone's rear facing camera captures images at up to 18 megapixels and it supports both HDR and 4K video. The front facing camera makes up for its 2-megapixel resolution with its larger, 1.75 μm-sized pixels that put more color into images and leave less space between dots of color.
As for horsepower, the Priv runs on last year's Qualcomm Snapdragon 808, a hexa-core processor, and the Adreno 418 graphics processing unit. The phone is stocked with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage space, which can be expanded by up to 256 GB via a microSD card.
The Priv's $100 discount for Father's Day follows up a permanent price cut BlackBerry issued back in April, which brought the handset's retail price down from $700 to $650. That price cut brought the Priv's price down on par with the iPhone 6s, which has had its own struggles due to the saturation of the premium segment of the market.
The Priv, launched last November, might have been BlackBerry's best shot at keeping its handsets business in tact, but now it seems there's an increased likelihood that the company's first Android phone will be its only Android phone.
Priv sales have been hundreds of thousands of units below expectations, according to an AT&T executive who asked to remain anonymous. The executive blamed low interest in the phone's hardware keyboard and even lower interest in the Priv's price tag.
AT&T has seen way more returns of the Priv than it had hoped and, last quarter, shifted about 600,000 of the 850,000 Priv handsets it had expected to move, said the unnamed executive.
