The Blackberry Priv: A Mixed Bag of Features and Flaws

As I spent more time with the Blackberry Priv, I found that this device has some fantastic features and tricks up its sleeve. The option to double tap to wake is something that I think every Android phone should have, as it's a game-changer for those who like to keep their device in standby mode. However, the company seems to have made it an exclusive feature only available on certain apps, which is a bit disappointing.

The notifications tray is also improved, with the ability to target specific apps when you receive multiple notifications from them. This is a great feature that makes it easy to manage your notifications and stay focused on what's important. On the side of the device, there's a productivity tab that shows full-screen calendar events, contacts, tasks, and other information. It's a nice touch, but I wish there were some app shortcuts available in this tab.

One of the standout features of the Blackberry Priv is its ambient display, which uses the AMOLED technology to provide a beautiful and energy-efficient display. The charging indicator is also a welcome addition, as it gives you an idea of how much battery life is left without having to check the actual power level. All these new additions are pretty intuitive and clean, making it easy to figure out what's going on with your device.

However, despite its solid set of specs, the Blackberry Priv has some significant hitches. I found that animations can slow down a bit and drop frames when multitasking or web browsing, which is frustrating. The phone also gets warm during extended use, especially when performing lighter tasks like gaming or switching between apps. It's not overheating or burning out, but it does feel noticeable.

One of the things that Blackberry has focused on is the keyboard experience, as this is where the company excels. The software keyboard is pretty good, and if you don't like it, you can replace it with the Google keyboard or any other Android keyboard alternative. However, I'm personally not a fan of hardware keyboards, and the keys on the Blackberry Priv feel tiny and close together. It's not ideal for those with larger hands, but I understand that not everyone has huge fingers.

To make up for this, there are some tricks available to improve your typing experience. You can swipe left to delete one word at a time, which is satisfying and easy to do. Double-tapping on the keyboard brings up cursor mode, allowing you to move around the text without actually pressing keys. This touchpad behavior also works in other apps, making it easier to scroll through content.

The camera on the back of the device is the weakest link in my opinion. It's 18 megapixel shooter with OIS and dual LED flash is capable of some mediocre-looking 4K video and decent photos. However, once you start losing light, the quality drops significantly. I've seen plenty of noise and artifacts, especially when compared to other smartphone cameras.

The camera app itself is clean and easy to use, but it's slow to take a photo, which can be frustrating. Exposure control is available with a neat slider at the bottom, but overall, the camera could benefit from some software updates to address these issues. The front-facing 2 megapixel camera is also underwhelming.

In conclusion, Blackberry has made some great strides in terms of productivity and features, but not enough to win me over personally. I used the device more like a normal Android phone, and it was just okay. If you're interested in a device with plenty of shortcuts and tricks, you might find the Priv appealing. However, if you prioritize camera quality or performance, you may want to look elsewhere.

As someone who started their smartphone journey with the Moto Droid, I have to say that I was underwhelmed by the Blackberry Priv's keyboard experience. The keys feel tiny, and while there are some tricks available to improve typing, it's not ideal for those who prefer a more traditional typing experience. That being said, I appreciate the fact that the keyboard is customizable, and users can replace it with other Android keyboards if they prefer.

Overall, the Blackberry Priv is a solid device with plenty of great features, but it's not without its flaws. If you're willing to overlook some of these issues in favor of a unique typing experience, this device might be worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys so Blackberry doesn't make that many phones anymore but this is their newest one it's called the Blackberry priv this is a smartphone made by Blackberry right but it runs Android I said before it would take a lot for me to actually review a Blackberry but this one this one's actually not bad no seriously it's not bad at all so right off the top for a Blackberry this phone is quite nice it's my favorite Blackberry ever but in the vast array of smartphones out now I'd say it's pretty middle- of the road average first of all with the build it's got quite a few things going for it obviously it's a vertical slider so that's pretty unique as far as smartphones go but when the keyboard is closed it's actually pretty clean the carbon fiber look all the way around the body the squared off top and bottom and the texture the material itself is actually really grippy both on the back and on the rails on the sides too so this is the phone that does not need a skin or a case it's never slid out of my pocket once never slid off a desk it's probably the most secure feeling phone I've ever held uh it's got the power button on the left and the trio of buttons on the right so volume up volume down and the toggle for volume control reminds me of other blackberries and there's also a front-facing speaker actually on the bottom too now it's really barely an average speaker it's pretty weak as far as quality goes but it's facing the user so it's still better than anything rear facing and then right above that speaker is a lip for you to grab the keyboard and that's where you can slide it open and close with one hand and I got used to this Motion in a matter of minutes and then over the course of weeks of using the device it felt correct pretty quickly the spring mechanism for opening it is solid feels durable and confident when the phone is open and it actually feels more balanced when it's open when the weight is spread out more doesn't feel top heavy at all my only complaint with the build is the thin back cover material I feel like since it's sealed in phone you could use whatever material you want but the back just feels soft and thin and kind of flexes now on paper again this is the best BlackBerry ever Snapdragon 808 chip 2 GB of RAM 32 gigs of internal storage but that's also expandable inside a 3,410 mAh battery with wireless charging and quick charging and a 5.4in Quad HD AMOLED display with slightly curved edges on both sides now among the other top smartphones it's kind of sitting mid to high end but still refreshing to see this in a Blackberry so the battery life I got was meh decent like B minus territory I was getting barely 3 hours of screen on time and the screen itself is pretty good not the best Quad HD moled display I've seen which is sort of a weird statement to make now but it's true and it's still plenty sharp but could be brighter and a bit more saturated but it's a quality panel and all of this under all the Blackberry logos and Hardware it runs Android 5.1 under the hood and it's actually pretty close to stock Android I wouldn't really call it a skin more of a vanilla Android with a bunch of blackberry enhancements and added features thrown in kind of like what Motorola does with their Moto X and this is kind of where Blackberry goes to town they added a ton of stuff mixing in classic older Blackberry features with new stuff in Android so you can swipe up from the bottom to not just get Google now but also BlackBerry device search and blackberry Hub I found Google Now does a pretty good job of searching the device anyway but I didn't use Blackberry Hub that much because it's sort of overwhelming it's a collection of all of your notifications from email and Twitter Etc everything shows up there you can also use icon packs from the Play Store in the custom launcher it's not Google Launcher but it's very similar plus this feature and it also has a feature called popup widgets which lets you swipe up from certain icons on your home screen to just show their widgets and this is already sort of a feature in some other third party Android launchers but hey it's built in now here and it's occasionally pretty useful especially I guess for music and media apps there's also a redesigned slightly crazy looking multitasking tray with like different apps of different sizes not sure why but that's the way it is and you also now have double tap to wake but no double tap to sleep I always say this I think every phone that has the option to double tap to wake should o let you double tap to sleep it also sorts your notifications in the tray so you can Target certain apps when you have multiple notifications from apps and over here on the side of your curve display is What's called the productivity tab you swipe in from the side kind of like the tab on the Galaxy S6 Edge and it shows full screen calendar events contacts tasks all sorts of stuff I kind of wish I could throw in some app shortcuts in there but that would take a software update it also throws in this sweet charging indicator and ambient display since it's an AMOLED display and it can do these things without using much battery and pretty much all these new additions are pretty intuitive and clean and easy to figure out what's weird though is that despite that pretty solid set of specs we talked about this guy has more hitches than a normal Android phone I found animations slowing down a bit and dropping a little frames more than I'd want to see out of a Snapdragon 808 device especially when multitasking and web browsing and switching between a bunch of stuff it's funny because gaming and intense stuff was perfectly fine Graphics held up and it didn't drop any frames everything was totally smooth but for some reason the quicker lighter stuff actually took some hits and it definitely got warm it never overheated or anything but I could definitely feel it in that thin back after extended use now I'm sure software updates including an update to marshmallow hopefully will fix a lot of these issues and even extend battery life a bit with those but for now that's my experience and then since it is a Blackberry after all there's a little focus on the keyboard and the typing experience so the software keyboard is pretty good but if you don't like it like I didn't you can replace it with the Google keyboard or anything else if you want it's Android and the hardware keyboard is all right I'm personally not a huge fan and look I like Hardware keyboards I started off my smartphone career with the Moto Droid that thing had an awesome keyboard but the keys were a lot bigger this Blackberry priv is a vertical slider and all the keys feel tiny and very close together a little too close for my fingers but I understand not everyone's hands are huge so here are some tricks for people who will really use this physical keyboard so you can swipe left to delete one word at a time so if you made a typo or something and you just want to delete it you get the satisfying gesture to get rid of words and then if you want to be a little more precise you can double tap to enter cursor mode and that's just a little little touch on the keyboard it's not actually pressing keys then it acts like a touchpad you can actually move around to choose where you want to type and this touchpad Behavior can work in other apps too so you can scroll through Twitter or Phoenix or Instagram or Chrome or whatever just by swiping along the top of the keyboard which is pretty cool might seem like a gimmick at first but all this stuff works really well to keep your fingers off the display so you can see the whole display while you're using it all right last thing to touch on with this priv is the camera on the back probably less important on a Blackberry But continuing on the theme it's better than any other Blackberry camera but it's really nothing special it's an 18 megapixel shooter with ois and the Dual LED flash on the back and it's capable of some pretty mediocre looking 4K video and the photos it takes it has this really steep quality curve from highlight to low light in highlight the photo look fine nice and sharp and detailed and have accurate color not a whole lot of dynamic range and highlights do blow out all the time but it looks fine but then very quickly once you start to lose light the photos get way worse and every smartphone camera suffers in low light but yeah this one really takes a hit you get plenty of noise and artifacts and processing just looks a little out of whack here the camera app itself is really clean nothing wrong with it except that it's really slow to actually take a photo why is there that much shutter lag I like that I have exposure control with a neat little slider down there at the bottom but yeah the camera app needs an update for a lot of these things to be fixed oh and the front-facing 2 megapixel camera is a joke so what did we learn with this phone well Blackberry has a whole bunch of good ideas lots of productivity tricks and neat shortcuts and things like that but not enough to win me over personally I used it kind of like a normal Android phone not a premium blackberry and it was just all right you might like it but I think I'll wait for the pre to thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next one peacehey what is up guys so Blackberry doesn't make that many phones anymore but this is their newest one it's called the Blackberry priv this is a smartphone made by Blackberry right but it runs Android I said before it would take a lot for me to actually review a Blackberry but this one this one's actually not bad no seriously it's not bad at all so right off the top for a Blackberry this phone is quite nice it's my favorite Blackberry ever but in the vast array of smartphones out now I'd say it's pretty middle- of the road average first of all with the build it's got quite a few things going for it obviously it's a vertical slider so that's pretty unique as far as smartphones go but when the keyboard is closed it's actually pretty clean the carbon fiber look all the way around the body the squared off top and bottom and the texture the material itself is actually really grippy both on the back and on the rails on the sides too so this is the phone that does not need a skin or a case it's never slid out of my pocket once never slid off a desk it's probably the most secure feeling phone I've ever held uh it's got the power button on the left and the trio of buttons on the right so volume up volume down and the toggle for volume control reminds me of other blackberries and there's also a front-facing speaker actually on the bottom too now it's really barely an average speaker it's pretty weak as far as quality goes but it's facing the user so it's still better than anything rear facing and then right above that speaker is a lip for you to grab the keyboard and that's where you can slide it open and close with one hand and I got used to this Motion in a matter of minutes and then over the course of weeks of using the device it felt correct pretty quickly the spring mechanism for opening it is solid feels durable and confident when the phone is open and it actually feels more balanced when it's open when the weight is spread out more doesn't feel top heavy at all my only complaint with the build is the thin back cover material I feel like since it's sealed in phone you could use whatever material you want but the back just feels soft and thin and kind of flexes now on paper again this is the best BlackBerry ever Snapdragon 808 chip 2 GB of RAM 32 gigs of internal storage but that's also expandable inside a 3,410 mAh battery with wireless charging and quick charging and a 5.4in Quad HD AMOLED display with slightly curved edges on both sides now among the other top smartphones it's kind of sitting mid to high end but still refreshing to see this in a Blackberry so the battery life I got was meh decent like B minus territory I was getting barely 3 hours of screen on time and the screen itself is pretty good not the best Quad HD moled display I've seen which is sort of a weird statement to make now but it's true and it's still plenty sharp but could be brighter and a bit more saturated but it's a quality panel and all of this under all the Blackberry logos and Hardware it runs Android 5.1 under the hood and it's actually pretty close to stock Android I wouldn't really call it a skin more of a vanilla Android with a bunch of blackberry enhancements and added features thrown in kind of like what Motorola does with their Moto X and this is kind of where Blackberry goes to town they added a ton of stuff mixing in classic older Blackberry features with new stuff in Android so you can swipe up from the bottom to not just get Google now but also BlackBerry device search and blackberry Hub I found Google Now does a pretty good job of searching the device anyway but I didn't use Blackberry Hub that much because it's sort of overwhelming it's a collection of all of your notifications from email and Twitter Etc everything shows up there you can also use icon packs from the Play Store in the custom launcher it's not Google Launcher but it's very similar plus this feature and it also has a feature called popup widgets which lets you swipe up from certain icons on your home screen to just show their widgets and this is already sort of a feature in some other third party Android launchers but hey it's built in now here and it's occasionally pretty useful especially I guess for music and media apps there's also a redesigned slightly crazy looking multitasking tray with like different apps of different sizes not sure why but that's the way it is and you also now have double tap to wake but no double tap to sleep I always say this I think every phone that has the option to double tap to wake should o let you double tap to sleep it also sorts your notifications in the tray so you can Target certain apps when you have multiple notifications from apps and over here on the side of your curve display is What's called the productivity tab you swipe in from the side kind of like the tab on the Galaxy S6 Edge and it shows full screen calendar events contacts tasks all sorts of stuff I kind of wish I could throw in some app shortcuts in there but that would take a software update it also throws in this sweet charging indicator and ambient display since it's an AMOLED display and it can do these things without using much battery and pretty much all these new additions are pretty intuitive and clean and easy to figure out what's weird though is that despite that pretty solid set of specs we talked about this guy has more hitches than a normal Android phone I found animations slowing down a bit and dropping a little frames more than I'd want to see out of a Snapdragon 808 device especially when multitasking and web browsing and switching between a bunch of stuff it's funny because gaming and intense stuff was perfectly fine Graphics held up and it didn't drop any frames everything was totally smooth but for some reason the quicker lighter stuff actually took some hits and it definitely got warm it never overheated or anything but I could definitely feel it in that thin back after extended use now I'm sure software updates including an update to marshmallow hopefully will fix a lot of these issues and even extend battery life a bit with those but for now that's my experience and then since it is a Blackberry after all there's a little focus on the keyboard and the typing experience so the software keyboard is pretty good but if you don't like it like I didn't you can replace it with the Google keyboard or anything else if you want it's Android and the hardware keyboard is all right I'm personally not a huge fan and look I like Hardware keyboards I started off my smartphone career with the Moto Droid that thing had an awesome keyboard but the keys were a lot bigger this Blackberry priv is a vertical slider and all the keys feel tiny and very close together a little too close for my fingers but I understand not everyone's hands are huge so here are some tricks for people who will really use this physical keyboard so you can swipe left to delete one word at a time so if you made a typo or something and you just want to delete it you get the satisfying gesture to get rid of words and then if you want to be a little more precise you can double tap to enter cursor mode and that's just a little little touch on the keyboard it's not actually pressing keys then it acts like a touchpad you can actually move around to choose where you want to type and this touchpad Behavior can work in other apps too so you can scroll through Twitter or Phoenix or Instagram or Chrome or whatever just by swiping along the top of the keyboard which is pretty cool might seem like a gimmick at first but all this stuff works really well to keep your fingers off the display so you can see the whole display while you're using it all right last thing to touch on with this priv is the camera on the back probably less important on a Blackberry But continuing on the theme it's better than any other Blackberry camera but it's really nothing special it's an 18 megapixel shooter with ois and the Dual LED flash on the back and it's capable of some pretty mediocre looking 4K video and the photos it takes it has this really steep quality curve from highlight to low light in highlight the photo look fine nice and sharp and detailed and have accurate color not a whole lot of dynamic range and highlights do blow out all the time but it looks fine but then very quickly once you start to lose light the photos get way worse and every smartphone camera suffers in low light but yeah this one really takes a hit you get plenty of noise and artifacts and processing just looks a little out of whack here the camera app itself is really clean nothing wrong with it except that it's really slow to actually take a photo why is there that much shutter lag I like that I have exposure control with a neat little slider down there at the bottom but yeah the camera app needs an update for a lot of these things to be fixed oh and the front-facing 2 megapixel camera is a joke so what did we learn with this phone well Blackberry has a whole bunch of good ideas lots of productivity tricks and neat shortcuts and things like that but not enough to win me over personally I used it kind of like a normal Android phone not a premium blackberry and it was just all right you might like it but I think I'll wait for the pre to thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace\n"