Android powered BlackBerry Priv Launched in India for Crazy $926 price tag

In an official announcement, BlackBerry launched their first Android powered smartphone BlackBerry PRIV in India today with the price tag of INR 62,990 (around $926) which is even higher from the iPhone 6S price that is selling at around INR 48000 (around $706) via online retailers. The device will be available via Amazon India website and on offline retail stores starting 30 January. This is worth mentioning that the PRIV is priced at $699 in the US, and in India, the interested buyers have to pay around $227 more to buy this phone. In US, the $699 price tag is already considered as ‘expensive’ by many users.

The reason for such a high price for PRIV in India is said to be because of the high-end features of the device and the popularity of Blackberry’s other devices in the country. But it is hard to predict if BlackBerry will survive with this price tag for PRIV in India as the high-end market of India is already dominated by the Apple’s iPhones and most of the buyers prefer Android devices at the second place after iOS. Now we have to wait to check weather this price will affect the PRIV sales in India or not.

BlackBerry Priv comes with a 5.4-inch QHD AMOLED display with 1440×2560 pixels resolution and is powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor (1.8GHz dual-core Cortex-A57, and 1.44GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) along with Adreno 418 GPU and 3GB of RAM. It comes with 32GB of inbuilt storage with up to 2TB of expandable storage capacity. It runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop OS out of the box.

It features an 18-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization, PDAF, dual-LED flash and 4K video recording support. The device also comes with a 2-megapixel front-facing camera with HD video recording support. Priv comes with a 3410mAh battery that can deliver up to 22.5 hours of mixed usage. It comes with connectivity options like 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with Direct functionality, 3.5mm audio jack, Micro-USB, NFC, Bluetooth 4.1 and GPS/ A-GPS. The device also comes with a number of sensors like accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, time of flight (ToF) sensor, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, altimeter and activity monitor sensor.

Are you looking to buy the BlackBerry PRIV in India at this high price or you will rather prefer the iPhones? Do share with us via comments.

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