After launching a high-end smartphone, the Priv, BlackBerry plans to focus on the mid-range segment this year by launching two mid-range smartphones. The company CEO John Chen revealed the news in an interview to The National.
According to the report, one smartphone will feature a full touch screen whereas the other will accommodate a physical QWERTY keypad. The prices range will be somewhere between $300-400 (roughly Rs. 20,000 - Rs. 26,600).
In the interview, Chen also admitted that Priv was unnecessarily priced high for enterprise customers. “A lot of enterprise customers have said to us, ‘I want to buy your phone but $700 is a little too steep for me. I’m more interested in a $400 device,” Chen revealed in the interview.
The BlackBerry Priv was launched with a price of $720 in the US but later slashed its price earlier this week. The smartphone now retails at $649 (approximately Rs. 43,000). Priv is also sold in India at a price tag of Rs. 62,990 via Amazon and offline retail stores. The price slash is yet to be made effective for the Indian market.
To refresh on the specifications, BlackBerry Priv features a 5.4-inch QHD AMOLED display of 1440x2560 pixels. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core chipset (1.8GHz dual-core Cortex-A57, and 1.44GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) clubbed with 3GB of RAM. The device comes with 32GB of expandable storage, and sports 18-megapixel of rear camera along with a 2-megapixel of front-camera, and 3,410mAh battery. On the software front, the device runs Android 5.1 Lollipop.
