Do you remember the BlackBerry handheld? I do, only the senior managers were allowed such coveted devices back in 2007. The BlackBerry was seen as the ultimate form factor for business users who want to look important as they took calls and sent emails. Adafruit's Anne Barela has used the Blackberry form factor as the basis of an Adafruit Feather RP2350 powered build which sees a DOS-like user interface with access to BASIC and CircuitPython in an appealing handheld machine.

Adafruit's Feather RP2350 is essentially the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 in Adafruit's Feather form factor and Barela is using it along with a Solder Party Keyboard Featherwing to provide a real Blackberry keyboard and a 2.6 inch LCD display to the Feather RP2350. For those who don't already know, Featherwings are Adafruit's version of HATs (Raspberry Pi) and Shields (Arduino) that connect to the GPIO of a board.

Barela uses the Solder Party Keyboard Featherwing as the internal structure of the build. The PCB mimics the form factor of the Blackberry, but has GPIO connections to connect to the Feather RP2350. Everything is wrapped in a 3D printed case, made using a Prusa MK4S but you could also make it on a budget 3D printer. The print is made from the top and middle layers of msglab's Lora msg build. A little rework was required to expose access to the Stemma QT port, but it was nothing that a Dremel couldn't solve! Holding it all together are four self-tapping screws. Power is provided via a LiPo battery via the RP2350 Featherwing.

The software element of the build is where we move even further back in time, to a time when C:\ was all you needed to get work done. PyDOS is a implementation of an MS-DOS style interface for microcontrollers like the RP2350, RP2040 and many ESP32 variants. Barela created an autoexec.bat file to set the prompt to match the famous C:\. PyDOS provides a typical selection of DOS commands, CD, DIR, TYPE, DELETE etc. It also provides a few external programs to run BASIC (PyBasic.py) a Python REPL (virtrepl.py) and commands to print and scroll text on an LCD display. For NeoPixel lovers, there are commands to control our favorite RGB LEDs.

PyDOS isn't a full MS-DOS experience, in that we cannot install Doom or load Windows 3.1, but it provides just enough to make it a workable tool for those quick hits of retro when out on the road.

Barela has documented the impressive build over at Adafruit.

AMD and BlackBerry announced a collaborative effort to advance next-generation robotic systems at Embedded World. The iconic tech company pairing said that new real-time platforms powered by AMD Kria K26 System on Modules (SOM) and BlackBerry’s QNX Software Development Platform (SDP) were ready to “revolutionize next-generation robotic systems.” Specifically, the potent mix of processing and real-time OS will reduce latency and jitter, and improve the repeatable determinism of robotic actions.

Reduced latency means faster performance — and time is money, so we are sure this will be welcome to robotics systems users. Fixing or minimizing jitter implies the robotic system will be able to complete more accurate, higher-quality work — another big benefit promised by the collaboration between AMD and BlackBerry QNX.

The more complicated concept of ‘repeatable determinism’ is also extremely important in robotics. This refers to the ability of a robot to perform the same action (or set of actions) with consistent results every time, under the same conditions. Many robotics tasks will benefit from this greater mix of precision and reliability, especially finely-tuned safety-critical robotic tasks, such as surgical and automotive work.

According to the press release from BlackBerry, the AMD Kria board (which features both Arm and FPGA programmable logic-based architecture) powers the advanced capabilities of the QNX microkernel real-time operating system (RTOS) in its new solution. The combination enables sensor fusion, high-performance data processing, real-time control, industrial networking, and reduced latency in robotic applications.

Grant Courville, BlackBerry QNX VP of Product & Strategy, summed up the collaborative achievement as “an integrated software-hardware foundation offering real-time performance, low latency, and determinism, to ensure that critical robotic tasks are executed with the same level of precision and responsiveness every single time.”

It remains to be seen whether the new technology will revolutionize the robotics industry or take robotics beyond its current restraints, which is what's being touted in the press release. Hopefully, the collaboration will continue regardless, however, as it sounds highly worthwhile. 

The Raspberry Pi Zero form factor has launched a plethora of handheld Linux machines. For this project, pseudonymous maker IMBalENce has created Blackberry Pi, which pairs the Zero W with RIM's Blackberry keyboard (remember those?) for a pocketable computing experience.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is not the most powerful Raspberry Pi, as that accolade lies with the Raspberry Pi 4. But the Zero form factor does provide us with the Zero 2 W, a machine comparable to the Raspberry Pi 3B.

Blackberry Pi Bill of Materials (BoM)

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Composite LCD (320×240) Link
• Solderparty BBQ20KBD keypad
• Adafruit Powerboost 1000c power supply
• Raspberry Pi camera NoIR v2.1
• 5V fan for cooling
• 2500mAh LiPo battery
• (Optional) USB hub for external usb port
• (Optional) RTC clock
• (Optional) ADC ADS1015 battery voltage monitor

The 3D printed case was designed using Solidworks, and printed using a modified Creality Ender 3 3D printer, possibly one of the Ender 3 range that features on our best 3D printers page. IMBalENce cleverly used multi-color printing to add a rainbow accent to the case, emulating the Sinclair ZX Spectrum's famous rainbow mark. Some 3D printer slicing software will detect multi-color prints and from there you can specify the point to change and purge the filament. If not, then you can write some G Code to make this happen.

The overall Blackberry design is accentuated by SolderParty's BBQ20KBD keypad, which is a breakout for Blackberry keypads. The keypad is connected to the Pi via the GPIO, specifically the I2C interface as it draws less power than a USB hub. Want to use some of the best Raspberry Pi HATs with Blackberry Pi? Well you can! IMBalENce has added a GPIO breakout to the top of the case. You will need a breakout board, such as Pimoroni's Black HAT Hacker, to access the connector, as otherwise you'll obscure the screen. If you're just connecting jumper wires, you are all good.

A series of brass inserts are located around the top of the unit to provide secure anchor points for future expansions. The brass inserts are melted into the 3D print using a soldering iron. The TS100, TS101 and Pinecil smart soldering irons have specialist tips designed for the task.

Around the back is a Raspberry Pi NoIR 2.1 camera. It's a fixed-focus (well, you can break the glue on the lens to manually focus) camera that offers decent quality live video and images in low light conditions. Power is provided by a 2500 mAh LiPo cell via an Adafruit Powerboost 1000C, which provides a stable 1A output (2A or 2.5A for a short time) to power everything and enable the battery to be charged while in use. A 5V fan connected to the Powerboost keeps everything cool, not a massive issue for the Pi Zero W, but should IMBalENce choose to upgrade to Pi Zero 2 W, the extra cooling will be beneficial.

The 320 x 240 px screen is good enough for the size and IMBalENce chose to boot directly into the terminal and set the framebuffer to match the resolution. This means that the screen is easy to read and ready to go for some terminal action. 

IMBalENce Blackberry Pi is an impressive project. It crams a lot of tech into the Blackberry form factor. You can read more about the project here.

When it comes to the Raspberry Pi, there’s no shortage of mini PCs. Being as small as a credit card, the Raspberry Pi is one of the most optimal (and affordable) boards on the market for creating an ultra-small yet fully functional computer. This week, maker and developer Carter Hurd contacted Tom's Hardware to tell us about his own spin on the concept with a snazzy Pi-powered retro computer modified from a retro PC Bluetooth speaker.

This classy-looking mini PC features a Raspberry Pi 3B inside as the main driver along with a complete Blackberry keyboard module for input. Everything didn’t fit exactly as planned so it was necessary for Hurd to 3D print some mounting brackets and additional components, as well, including a bezel for what looks like a square Pimoroni Hyper Pixel. 

The project is built using a Divoom Ditoo brand Bluetooth speaker—specifically the Retro Pixel Art Game Bluetooth Speaker. Hurd had to remove much of the original interior components including the main driver board, original screen, and button assembly. The new modifications allow it to function as a real PC rather than just a novelty imitation.

The new build features a Raspberry Pi 3B inside, powering an LCD screen for the display along with a Blackberry keyboard module from Solder Party. The display is spiced up with a custom made curved cover (created using a thermoplastic) that adds a rounded, retro monitor feel.

As far as software goes, you could run any OS on here that you’d like. In this case, Hurd has opted to use the Raspberry Pi OS but there’s no reason you couldn’t use something like Diet Pi or even RetroPie. Because it has a 3B inside, you could always add a Bluetooth controller and use it as a tiny retro gaming rig.

If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project, you’re in luck. Hurd has shared a detailed video outlining the build process that you could follow along with at home to remake it yourself. The 3D printed files weren’t shared but you might be able to fashion them at home or engineer new solution to make the components fit together. If you’re looking for a cool, retro-themed Pi project to dig into, be sure to check out this one.

Looking rather like a pocket calculator or a Blackberry cell phone, this beautiful Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-powered handheld computer from Twitter user Sulfuroid will be crowdfunding soon on the Crowd Supply website.

The brainchild of a maker we’ve featured before, the proposed handheld (which its maker refers to as a ‘Sharpikeebo’) has a familiar form factor. Seasoned followers of SBCs will notice a passing similarity to Pocket Chip, a $5 computer (and $75 PCB) which also used a custom PCB. Sulfuroid's projects uses a Sharp 2.7 inch 400 x 240px display, and has a full QWERTY keyboard, albeit with rather tiny keys (though not as tiny as some we’ve featured recently), and an RFM95 long range radio chip which operates at 868 MHz, that can be used for long range communications and control. In one tweet we can even see an external antenna for greater range. Long range communication capable pocket computers seems to be a popular topic for Raspberry Pi.

On the rear of the board we see a 40 pin header for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W's GPIO. This provides both power and data connectivity to the main PCB. The Pi Zero 2 W is inserted upside down, with the USB port point to the top of the board. Just under the header is space for a LiPo battery which will power the unit when on the move. To charge the battery we see a USB C port, and some form of voltage regulator / battery management chip.

The project has been in development for some time, and going through Sulfuroid's tweets we can see key moments in the development. On January 13 we see the first power on, booting to a terminal in Raspberry Pi OS (even though the console shows "Raspbian" in the top corner.) On the same day we see the unit soldered up and ready for testing, with the creator saying "So excited. With the new quality soldering station. I was able to solder the Sharpikeebo computer." A testament to the adage "the right tool for the right job." Another moment in the project's history is the obligatory "LED blinkies" test, again on January 13 (it seems this was a great day for the project) which sees the onboard 603 package LEDs tested.

The crowdfunding effort has yet to go live. Remember that crowdfunding a project is not a guarantee of receiving a finished product. Backing a crowdfunded project is akin to an investment, you believe in the project and want it to succeed. You are not purchasing a retail product.

Skylight Cyber researchers from Australia were able to show the first universal method to trick an “artificial intelligence-based antivirus” into thinking that malware is non-harmful software and let it run on supposedly secured machines. 

The AI antivirus in question is called CylancePROTECT, which BlackBerry purchased last year with plans to integrate Cylance’s AI antivirus technology with its Spark communications platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). The recent discovery points to a potential roadbump in Blackberry's pivot from smartphones to IoT security. 

Creating Universal Bypasses for AI Antivirus

The Skylight researchers said that by analyzing Cylance’s engine and neural net model, they were able to see that the AI antivirus made heavy use of string analysis and had a bias for a particular game. 

This allowed the security researchers to use this bias against the antivirus -- they appended a selected list of strings to any malicious file that would normally be detected and avoided detection. They noted that this method worked for 100% of the top 10 malware (for May 2019) and for 90% of the larger sample of 384 malware. 

Malicious hackers create new malware based on code from older malware that is still able to bypass modern antiviruses all the time. However, that requires a significant amount of work for every new piece of malware. The difference here is that by discovering the AI antivirus’ weakness, the bad actors can easily torpedo machines protected by such antivirus with all sorts of slightly modified malware. 

How AI Can Easily Be Fooled

With a single piece of research, the Skylight security experts were able to show just how catastrophically vulnerable AI-based antivirus tools like CylancePROTECT can be before they even had a chance to get popular the cybersecurity industry. 

The researchers offered an easy-to-understand analogy for how AI-based antivirus solutions can be so easy to trick. If the AI would be trained to learn the difference between birds and humans, it would eventually learn that one of the primary differences between a bird and a human is that birds have beaks and humans don’t. 

'Eureka,' the AI vendor might say. Now the vendor can assume that because its AI isn't highly effective at detecting birds but is effective at detecting humans, AI should be able to tell a picture of one from the other. That's the logic behind AI antivirus. If AI antivirus can look at thousands of existing samples of malware and identify the vast majority of them as malware, then the vendor can presume that it’s highly effective at detecting similar malware.

However, according to the Skylight researchers, malware makers are not “wooden dummies” -- they fight back and can come up with clever tricks that are easy to implement and could completely confuse the AI. In the above bird versus human example, if a human would wear a mask with a bird beak, said human could be confused for a bird. 

The AI model could be fixed to take other features into account, but those could similarly be fooled, too, which is why the researchers concluded that AI antivirus is nowhere near being the cybersecurity silver bullet that vendors have promised it would be.

Should We Just Kill the AI Antivirus Hype Now?

We’ve seen in different industries that AI that tends to be highly-optimized (or biased) for a particular set of features based on the data it was given. It also seems to be difficult to give the AI the right balance of data covering all aspects of the problem areas. 

Vendors of future AI technologies will likely continue to struggle to find the right balance for the training of their AI solution potentially in perpetuity. Similarly, security experts will have to keep fighting bad actors and exploits against their system and app protections in perpetuity, too.

For businesses, AI antiviruses seem problematic, not just because they can be universally bypassed by malware once whatever bias they have in their model is found, but also because AI-based security solutions need to be fed virtually all of the data that passes through a company’s network. 

This turns the AI antivirus into yet another potentially enormous liability both in terms of privacy and security. The AI antivirus becomes a single point of failure, so if its servers are hacked, all of that enterprise customer data could then be in the hands of bad actors.

However, as long as adding the buzzword "AI" to a product's description increases the hype around it, security vendors will likely continue to benefit from such marketing tactics, even as integrating such AI solutions could potentially weaken enterprise networks. 

BlackBerry was awarded $814.9 million following a dispute with Qualcomm over patent royalties.

How The Dispute Started

Back in 2010, BlackBerry signed a license agreement with Qualcomm, in which it paid royalties for all the Snapdragon-based smartphones it was expecting to sell by 2015.

As we know, BlackBerry hasn’t done so well in the smartphone market over the past few years, and in fact it even got out of the market last year. The company entered arbitration with Qualcomm last year to recuperate some of the money it paid for licenses that it never used.

Even though the original deal was supposed to be non-refundable, per the contract between the two companies, the arbitrator seems to have agreed with BlackBerry that it doesn’t make sense to pay royalties for units it never sold. As such, Qualcomm was ordered to refund BlackBerry a part of the original sum. Qualcomm said in a statement that it disagrees with the decision, but it’s binding, so it will have to refund BlackBerry.

Qualcomm’s Patent Troubles

Over the past several years, Qualcomm has drawn the attention of multiple regulators who accused Qualcomm of abusing its market position to overcharge its customers and take out competitors.

Qualcomm was recently fined over $850 million by the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC). Back in 2015, it also had to pay a $975 million fine to the Chinese government over similar accusations. The European Commission started its own ongoing antitrust investigation against the company in the same year.

This year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also charged Qualcomm with using anti-competitive tactics to monopolize the market. Apple sued the modem maker for $1 billion, too, arguing that it overcharged it for basic smartphone technology.

Qualcomm recently launched a counter-suit against Apple, but so far it looks like all the evidence is piling up against Qualcomm as being the aggressor in the market. It was also recently revealed from the KFTC’s case against Qualcomm that the company blocked Samsung from selling its own Exynos chips to other smartphone manufacturers for 25 years. This may explain why Samsung never decided to sell its highly competitive chip to other companies, the same way it sells its Super AMOLED displays or builds competitors' chips in its manufacturing facilities.

Updated, 4/12/2017, 11:55pm PT: Qualcomm denied that it has been blocking Samsung from selling its own chips to other smartphone manufacturers:

"Qualcomm has never stood in the way of Samsung selling chips to third parties, and nothing in our agreements has ever prevented Samsung from doing so. Any statement to the contrary is false," said a company representative.

Although BlackBerry didn’t make any major hardware announcements at CES, we did sit down with David Kleidermacher, BlackBerry’s Chief Security Officer to talk about the Priv’s security and its new CHACE initiative.

Lingering Questions On The BlackBerry Priv

Tom’s Hardware: Although the BlackBerry Priv is still running Android Lollipop [5.1.1], you’ve been pushing out Google’s monthly security updates regularly. In fact, I think one came out in early-December even before Google released it for its Nexus phones, which was great to see.

David Kleidermacher: This is something we have not yet made a big deal about that is a really big deal. We said a whole lot about how we’re going to do this frequent security patching, and now we’ve delivered on that promise.

TH: It is a big deal that you kept that promise, because other OEMs are not delivering updates as fast as they should be.

When it comes to Android, there’s the core OS and its built-in security features, and then these monthly patches to address exploits that Google may discover out in the wild. What is more important, the base securing of the device or the timely delivery of the security monthly updates?

DK: I wouldn’t say either is more important. You have to have a defense in depth strategy, which means that you need to build as much security as you can from the ground up. [It’s] all the things mentioned on our [Inside BlackBerry] blog about building [security] into the hardware, firmware and into the Linux kernel, into the Android stack. The things we do to harden all those things are very important, but it’s naive to think that no matter how good a job you do when you have something as sophisticated and complicated as Android, that it’s not going to have problems. It’s going to have problems, and you must do the patching.

So to do a good job on Android security, you need to build it in from the ground up, and you need to be able to react quickly if there is a problem. Both are important as a defense in-depth strategy. I wouldn’t say either are more important than the other.

TH: Are you able to say why you think what you’ve done to the underlying core of Android on the Priv is better than what your competition has done?

DK: Well I can, it’s just that there are two problems: I’m not an expert on everyone else’s device. They don’t disclose all details, so for me to speculate – “Hey, we do x, y and z they do a, b, c, and mine is better than theirs,” would not be appropriate. So my approach has been, let’s explain in the public domain the things that we do that we think the public should know about. We actually go above and beyond what AOSP does. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve written a lot of material on that, and we’ll continue to do more. But I think it’s kind of unprecedented how much information we’ve actually put out there.

You’ve seen “insert favorite Android vendor,” they don’t talk about this stuff. As an example, we talk about how Google Android has some facilities built-in for integrity validation, so how do you know it’s running the known good version of Android that was shipped by the OEM? Well, Google has some stuff that they’ve built into Android [that] is essentially self-validating the system image. To know that it passes signature checks – if someone tampered with that system image, it would be detected. That’s really important for protecting against rooting and malware.

But one of the things it does not do is runtime integrity protection, so [what it does now] is kind of a boot time check. Which is great, really useful, but if malware gets into the system, and it’s able to get a hook into the system at runtime, you’ve not modified the flash firmware, but you’ve changed the runtime image. That’s also bad -- arguably worse -- because you can’t detect that.

We have something we call the BlackBerry Integrity Detection Engine -- we call it internally “BIDE.” And it is a runtime validation of the system, so we’re essentially underneath Android, something Google really can’t do, because it’s done in the firmware of the device. We’re looking up at Android; while it’s running, we’re watching it and measuring it, and observing it, and saying, “Does everything look okay?” That’s a really good example of something we do that your standard platform doesn’t do.

What About Marshmallow, And Smartphone Security?

TH: Let’s talk about Marshmallow [Android 6] -- I know it is coming to the Priv, so we know it’s going to happen. However, some people have been saying that Marshmallow has a couple of security features that Lollipop [Android 5.1.1 that the Priv runs] doesn’t have, which means in a few areas, a Marshmallow device could be more secure than the Priv. Do you agree or disagree?

DK: I think there’s two different questions there. One is, “Do there exist improvements in M that are improving Android security?” I would say yes to that question. The second question is, “Overall, if you look at the entire platform, and as an enterprise or a consumer buying a phone, would you consider a Priv running Lollipop less secure than ‘insert random OEM device running Marshmallow,’” and I would say absolutely not. I would disagree with that.

TH: The crux of many of the arguments is why did the Priv launch with Lollipop when Marshmallow was already out?

DK: There is an immense amount of engineering that goes into securing the overall Android platform, and, you know, Marshmallow’s improvements to Permission Controls for apps is a really great thing. I don’t want to make it sound like that’s not important, but it’s this little thing in this immense ocean of security that goes into securing a device. There’s a lot of special sauce right now [in the Priv] that is important, so yeah, I’d say we’re really proud of the Android L-level overall platform that we have, and are just going to make things better.

TH: Will your Marshmallow be the most secure?

DK: I believe it will be, just the same way we feel about Lollipop and its place in our overall platform -- we’re taking all the other platform pieces like the one I just described, that extra level of integrity checking, and that’s going to be in our Marshmallow, and in other [OEMs’] systems it won’t be. I’m confident that our [Android 6] will be the state of the art gold standard for Android security.

TH: So Ron [Louks, BlackBerry's President of Devices] said Q1 for the update -- we are on track for that, right?

DK: As far as I know, but good security companies have this compartmentalization so if you don’t need to know…I know it’s being actively worked on as fast as we can, but if there is an exact date, I don’t personally know it.

TH: How does a business customer evaluate all the secure smartphones available on the market, and how do they know what they’re buying is the most secure?

DK: You’re right though -- anyone who has done great [security] work in the past doesn’t guarantee great things in the future. But it’s definitely a piece of evidence that you can use [to evaluate them now], and that’s great.

Over time, you want to do better than that, you want more of a scientific approach to evaluation. There’s a number of security standards out there; there’s FIPS 140-2 for crypto assurance, there’s Common Criteria certifications that the government puts mobile devices through…I look at all of those certifications as trying to weed out all the really bad stuff out there.

They’re trying to make sure that you are using the right protocols for SSL…it’s all good stuff. But in the end, do those certifications give you a very high level of confidence that something can’t be hacked? I don’t think anyone would claim that. If you read the fine print, you’ll know what they’re trying to do, and it’s like basic commercial best practices. It’s not, “How do I know that nation state attackers or sophisticated criminals can’t hack into this thing.” That’s not what they’re trying to do, and ultimately that’s where BlackBerry wants to go.

One of the things that I’m working on is a very strategic effort to come up with a common framework, a common methodology for the following: Anything that has security -- not just a phone, but a medical device, an insulin pump, a piece of software, anything -- how do you specify the security capabilities it should have?

In some devices you need encryption. In other kinds of devices you might not… so what kind of security things do you first need and can you define those things in a common way? Can you create a common framework for defining security requirements? That’s the first important part.  There’s no way of doing that today. Well, Common Criteria is a way of doing that, but it’s not very widely used.

The second thing you need to do, once you specify the requirements, is how do you go about evaluating that the device or thing, or piece of software, actually, faithfully implements the security that [the manufacturer] has claimed. This is huge; this is the thing that’s missing right now.

Ultimately, pedigree only goes so far. Ultimately, to get a high level of assurance, you need to evaluate the security. When I say “evaluate,” that means a number of different things, but probably the most important thing is you have to try to hack the thing. You have to have really good hackers that are taking potshots at the thing and trying to figure out how to get in.

Yes, that does already happen. Some top customers who can afford it do that already. But that doesn’t really scale [to smaller organizations]. We need to have a single entity, a non-profit evaluation lab that will do that -- the hacking, the evaluation of the [security] design. For us, for all buyers out there, so that it’s economical. So you can get a high level of assurance in an economical and practical way. That’s the strategic goal.

Chasing CHACE

DK: At BlackBerry we have this thing called CHACE, the Center for High Assurance Computing Excellence. It’s a general corporate initiative of BlackBerry. Our goal is to raise the bar on assurance.

Two things go into that: One is obviously engineering. What are the cool, special sauce things we can do to build better security from the ground up. That’s something that CHACE is focusing on…of course, all of BlackBerry is focusing on [it], but CHACE is the leading edge of R&D in this area.

The second thing, is, “Okay you’ve done all these great [security] things you claim you’ve done, but how do independent observers have confidence?” That’s where our evaluation standard comes in.

Right now we’re targeting medical equipment, simply because there are people out there worried about all these connected healthcare devices that they’re using for more and more critical things like insulin delivery. They’re really worried about hackers getting into those things and killing people, so there’s a real appetite for getting that level of [security] evaluation, so we’ve started there. But our vision is that we can apply this to anything.

TH: Where are you with CHACE right now?

DK: In its current state, it’s nickname right now is DTSec [a medical device cybersecurity standard], and it has been published for public review. There has been an email blast to all these people we know, like the FDA, who is actually involved in helping us build the standard, a bunch of medical device manufacturers, independent cyber security experts like BlackBerry and physicians. It’s an international coalition of people, it’s not just a U.S. standard -- this is international, so Health Canada, for example, has been involved in it, the Department of Homeland Security, so on and so forth.

We’ve put it out for public review, and it’s targeting a certain class of diabetic devices for now, just because we have to start somewhere, but it will be ratified likely toward the end of this quarter, in the March time frame. Then there will be version one, then the first devices -- the first insulin pumps and glucose meters -- will go through the [security] evaluation process, they’ll get certified, and we will then have an example that we can show people how this can be done.

TH: How long before this grows to encompass devices outside healthcare?

DK: It’s a marketing problem. We’re breaking the back of the technical problem. We built the framework, we’re showing people how you specify the requirement. By the way, while it’s a new standard, we’re leveraging existing standards. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. Common Criteria has a very good framework for specifying requirements, and we’ve adopted that.

The part that’s really important is the evaluation program. Bringing a product in and having a lab go through and look through the design. actually go and try to hack it, those are things that haven’t been done in any kind of standardized way. There have been little pockets of government that’s tried to do it here and there, but no general independent standards.

It’s simply a marketing problem -- it’s getting the right industry organizations like SAE [Society of Automotive Engineers] in the automotive sphere, and similar organizations in the industrial sphere, it’s getting them all aware and bought into what we’re doing and adopting it.

TH: This sounds very interesting. Once it becomes the standard in every industry, it’s going to solve a lot of problems and address questions people have about the security of devices.

DK: Here’s my favorite quote that I love, because it succinctly explains the problem: “If we want to raise the bar on cybersecurity, we have to know how to measure its height.”

Alex Davies is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware and Tom's IT Pro, covering Smartphones, Tablets, and Virtual Reality. You can follow him on Twitter. Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

BlackBerry is keeping its promise to release monthly security updates for its recently launched Priv smartphone by releasing an update containing security patches as well as other improvements to the camera app, system performance, and stability.

The camera app received a few tweaks to make it open faster than before and also shoot better pictures in low-light situations. The company said it improved the system’s performance, as well, but it didn’t mention how exactly. Instances of freezes and crashes should also be reduced with the new update. The recent update also includes December’s security patches that fix all known vulnerabilities for Android 5.1.1.

This update, which is a 475 MB file, will be received over-the-air for all unlocked Priv devices purchased through BlackBerry’s store. The devices that were purchased through carriers will get it on December 7, which is still not ideal, but far smaller of a delay compared to most other Android devices.

BlackBerry has planned some improvements for some of the Priv apps, including the camera app (again), the keyboard, and Hub & Contacts, as well as DTEK, the new privacy app.

The camera will receive a few new filters, while the keyboard will get increased language support, and emojis will be added to predictive typing. Hub & Contacts will include support for Whatsapp, while DTEK will add new alerts for when other apps use your information. All of these apps will be updated on December 14.

Because the Priv is BlackBerry’s last chance to prove itself in mobile, it’s no surprise that the company is treating it more seriously and why it’s so eager to prove it cares about the device’s security.

The new Nexus devices may still be more secure thanks in part to their Android 6.0 verified boot process, which can’t be added to pre-Android 6.0 devices in an update. It also doesn’t look like there has been an extensive modification of the kernel to protect it against exploits, as we were initially led to believe. BlackBerry has a rather confusing policy on encryption backdoors, as well.

However, BlackBerry still seems to be doing more than what most other Android OEMs are doing, which is providing monthly security updates as well as some privacy-focused apps such as DTEK, which better educate users how their sensitive information is being used by other third-party applications.

If you own a BlackBerry Priv, you can check Settings > About System Updates > Check for Updates to see if you got yours yet.

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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.

Earlier today, BlackBerry's Chief Operating Officer (COO), Marty Beard, published a blog post announcing the company's exit from Pakistan after the local government threatened it with a shut down if it doesn't provide complete access to all BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) traffic data. Soon after the post was published, the Pakistani government delayed its shutdown order by another month, until the end of the year, which prompted BlackBerry to delay its exit as well.

In July, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority notified the local wireless carriers that BlackBerry's BES servers would no longer be allowed to operate in the country for "security reasons."

BlackBerry believes that the government doesn't actually want to shut down its service, but it's more of an ultimatum to force the company to give it access to its BES traffic data, which includes BES emails and BES BBM messages.

In his post, Beard also said that the company does not support granting "back door" access to its "customers' information," and that it hasn't done it anywhere in the world. This seems to contradict his own words from only two weeks ago that the company takes a "balanced approach" to encryption, unlike some of BlackBerry's competitors, who are "all about encryption all the way."

The statement seemed strange considering BlackBerry has just launched a privacy-focused smartphone, and it has always allowed companies to keep their own private keys. Perhaps this is where BlackBerry makes the distinction. It can be persuaded to give access to the data of regular BlackBerry users, but not the data of enterprise users. This would be backed up by the company's previous actions in the past, when it gave BBM access to the Indian and Saudi governments.

As its market share in both enterprise, but especially the consumer smartphone markets, dwindles, BlackBerry is trying to keep what's left of its reputation intact. This could be why in its recent blog post, BlackBerry re-affirmed its commitment to the security of corporate, government and military customers, but it didn't mention protecting the security of regular consumers as well.

In the past, BlackBerry seemed too quick to react to local government threats that its service would be shut down, and as such it agreed to allow access to the data of regular consumers. However, as we're seeing now, most of the time the governments are unwilling to follow up on that. They seem to merely want BlackBerry to be afraid and give up its customers' privacy. If BlackBerry, and other companies, would fight harder for their users' privacy, most governments would have no choice but to accept the situation and give up. Otherwise, they could face having other companies leave the country and harm their own economies.

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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.

Copperhead is a Toronto-based security firm created this year that aims to significantly improve the security of Android by adding enhancements to Android's kernel and userspace that may not even be on Google's roadmap right now. The team, consisting of information security researchers, forensic analysts, and software developers, already open sourced an alpha-version of its own security-hardened CopperheadOS this summer. It has also been contributing security fixes and improvements to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

Soon after BlackBerry officially announced the Priv at the end of last week, Copperhead took issue with the fact that the Priv is already considered by many to be the pinnacle of Android security. We interviewed Daniel Micay, Copperhead's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a contributor to the AOSP, to see why his company believes the Priv isn't as secure as everyone makes it out to be.

Tom's Hardware: You said in a rather controversial tweet that the BlackBerry Priv isn't "at the forefront of Android security," because it hasn’t adopted the security improvements in Android 6.0. Are you implying Android 6.0 is overall more secure than the BlackBerry Priv custom Android 5.1.1 OS? Are the latest Nexus phones more secure than BlackBerry Priv?

Daniel Micay: Nexus phones are more secure than the BlackBerry Priv because Android 6.0 offers some security improvements over 5.1.1. That applies to both the new devices (Nexus 5x and Nexus 6p) and the older devices that are still supported with OS upgrades.

If BlackBerry had significantly hardened 5.1.1, it would be a different story. However, they haven't made any substantial improvements. Nexus devices also already had monthly security updates before the release of the Priv, and it isn't yet clear that BlackBerry is able to deliver on their promise across carriers. Samsung has also made a commitment to deliver monthly updates, but that's different than delivering on it.

TH: What are the enhancements you think BlackBerry did to the Android kernel, and what do they mean for users?

DM: They have the PAX_USERCOPY feature from PaX to provide detection of buffer overflows for some copies to and from the kernel. They also have the PAX_PAGEEXEC feature, but it's not very useful on an architecture with NX support like ARM where it doesn't need to provide emulation of the feature. It simply turns a violation of the no-execute permissions into an unrecoverable failure.

They're not claiming to have a Grsecurity kernel because usage of the trademark requires something up to the standards of the grsecurity developers. There's no official / maintained patch for Android's 3.10 Linux kernel, and they also don't have 99 percent of the features enabled. The grsecurity patch offers the benefit of having many backported security fixes and a steady stream of improvements, but that only applies to the maintained releases.

BlackBerry made their own changes to the kernel too, but none of these appears to be useful. They're duplicating the access control features that are already provided via Android's full system SELinux policy.

On the other hand, it doesn't appear that they've done much to harden userspace, and that's arguably even more important due to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities being more serious than the local privilege escalation issues commonly found in the kernel. Hardening the kernel won't really do anything to mitigate any of the recent RCE bugs like all of the issues in libstagefright and libutils. It does help to contain the attacker once they've successfully gained control over a process, since a kernel exploit can be used to escape from a sandbox.

TH:Why do you think they are not sufficient compared to the improvements in Android 6.0?

DM: There's really not much that they actually did, and Google's security team wasn't just sitting still for a year.

TH: Would BlackBerry Priv’s security enhancements have prevented the Stagefright exploits?

DM: No. They don't appear to have done any work relevant to those.

Some of those vulnerabilities were prevented by the userspace hardening features in CopperheadOS such the 2 critical libutils heap overflows we reported and the one reported by Joshua Drake from Zimperium. Most memory corruption bugs will be significantly harder to exploit in CopperheadOS even if they aren't caught by a specific feature. Among other things relevant to memory corruption bugs: PaX's improved implementation of ASLR, various hardening features from OpenBSD malloc (rather than Android's very exploit-friendly jemalloc allocator) and other improvements to features like ASLR in userspace, like library isolation.

Google is enabling automated integer overflow checking for libstagefright and the other audio/video libraries in the development branch, and we'll likely backport a lot of that as we have with the similar work elsewhere. Since moving to 6.0 is in-progress, that will be approached after we're migrated over. That feature would have been able to prevent most of the libstagefright vulnerabilities.

TH:You’ve open sourced your own alpha-stage CopperheadOS ROM, which is based on Android 5.1.1. Some have said that it’s hypocritical of you to criticize BlackBerry Priv because of this. What do you say to that?

DM: I don't think it's hypocritical. The criticism of BlackBerry was that they are claiming to be leading the way on the security front when it is really not the case. CopperheadOS is carefully marked as being in a very early alpha state right now. All of our work is open source, and a subset of it has been successfully contributed to AOSP. Some of those changes shipped with 6.0. On the other hand, BlackBerry's operating system appears to be closed source, other than the kernel that they're required to release due to the GPL2. Even if they had done substantial work, it wouldn't be moving Android's security forwards in the rest of the ecosystem.

In the future, we can backport important security features to the version of the operating system we're using. It wouldn't be very sensible to spend more of our time doing that right now. It's still in alpha, so developing new features and contributing as much as possible to the Android Open Source Project makes more sense. There's long term value in new features, while backporting only offers benefits until it is moved along to the next version.

Basing it on CyanogenMod will mean new versions take a few extra months to arrive, while using the raw Android Open Source Project code would avoid that. However, basing it on AOSP would limit it to Nexus devices without extra work and would end up resulting in the proprietary Google Play components being much more important. CyanogenMod tends to fill holes left by the migration of components into Google Play. Their in-progress browser based on Chromium is a great example. This isn't set in stone: It can be changed before a stable release, and using AOSP might end up being the only way to make it stable enough.

That said, CopperheadOS does have backports of 6.0 security features, and features that are not yet in 6.0 from master. It's also starting to be the case that many of the security improvements in the Android Open Source Project are the changes we've submitted or steered in the right direction. And the hardening features it already has are substantial.

TH:What are some of the enhancements you’re doing to your own kernel?

DM: CopperheadOS has a port of PaX with more of the features enabled. It has improved Address Space Layout Randomization (PAX_ASLR, PAX_RANDUSTACK, PAX_RANDMMAP), prevention of code injection (PAX_MPROTECT), and more of the kernel self-protection features enabled: PAX_USERCOPY, PAX_REFCOUNT, PAX_MEMORY_SANITIZE along with PAX_KERNEXEC and PAX_MEMORY_UDEREF for the upcoming Nexus 6 release). It has a custom system for setting fine-grained PaX exceptions for Android apps so it can actually have the features enabled for most apps, too.

The OS also offers a setting for MAC randomization (enabled by default) which is implemented in the kernel, but it could also be implemented in userspace.

Most of the work has been on hardening userspace rather than hardening the kernel. The technical overview has good coverage of these features and is mostly up-to-date.

TH: Which of them are already in Android 6.0 and which aren’t?

DM: None of the kernel improvements are present in Android 6.0 yet. Google is working on improving the kernel's ASLR implementation in the development branch, but it's not yet comparable to PaX.

In userspace, some of our _FORTIFY_SOURCE (buffer overflow detection) improvements made it into 6.0, and lots of these will be part of the next release, among other improvements.

TH: What kind of protections do your additional enhancements offer?

DM: Some bugs can't be exploited anymore, and most bugs are significantly harder to exploit. Beyond the low-level hardening, which is most of the work, there are also high-level enhancements like properly integrated support for setting a separate encryption and lockscreen password. Also lots of changes to the default settings to make things more secure and private by default.

TH: Have any of your enhancements been adopted by AOSP or will be in the future?

DM: [Here's a list of changes that were submitted.] Most of those have been merged already, and some are waiting for review or other changes. It's a small subset of the total work in CopperheadOS, but the intention is to upstream more in the future. There have also been contributions in terms of design suggestions, rather than just in terms of contributed code. For example, AOSP adopted setjmp register mangling (a memory corruption exploit mitigation) and hidepid=2 (hiding lots of process information between apps) based on our suggestions.

Contributing code upstream gets it reviewed by Google, so they can suggest their own improvements. It also means it's not going to need to be fixed if conflicting changes occur, since it's maintained as part of AOSP. Anyone making substantial improvements to Android would end up sending patches upstream for bugs and other issues that they're finding, even if they don't want to take advantage of upstreaming features. For example, four sets of vulnerabilities (two critical severity, one low, one high) were found as part of the regular CopperheadOS development, along with various issues that were not vulnerabilities.

TH: Why can’t you port the whole or most of the Grsecurity patchset to Android? Would that break too many things? If it’s a question of funding or development time, would Google be able to do it?

DM: Android devices are stuck with 3.4 and 3.10 kernels with many out-of-tree vendor drivers. The kernels aren't supported by the stable grsecurity patch (3.14). Funding could be provided to grsecurity in order to align a new stable patch, with the next kernel version adopted by Android, and that would go a long way to solving this problem.

Additionally, BlackBerry's device uses a 64-bit ARM CPU, and Grsecurity is not really ported to that architecture yet. The most meaningful features are not available. It's another example of work that needs to be funded, although some of the simple features would be easy enough to port (but BlackBerry didn't do it).

TH: Does CopperheadOS work with the Play Store or F-Droid? Have there been any compromises in security to enable them?

DM: CopperheadOS currently ships with F-Droid as a system application. It implies some trust in the F-Droid developers, so that essentially makes it a security compromise. Down the road, we could offer specialized builds of the OS with only the necessary apps for a given use case and potentially more aggressive security features due to not needing to preserve compatibility with third party apps.

CopperheadOS supports installing Google Play components just as CyanogenMod does, but it's not ever going to be built-in. It goes out of the way to preserve compatibility with it. Google Play adds a lot of attack surface, and many users don't want to hand over control of their device to Google.

TH: When can we expect CopperheadOS to be a daily driver ROM for the Nexus 5? Will any other devices be supported in the future?

DM: It currently supports the Nexus 5, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Nexus 9. It will support the Nexus 6 in the near future, followed by the Nexus 5x and Nexus 6p. There are no plans to add support for other devices. Each supported device adds more time testing and debugging device-specific problems, such as memory corruption bugs detected in device-specific code by OpenBSD malloc. Each one also needs a port of PaX. The main issue right now is simply time required to build ROMs for each device, but that can be solved by throwing money at the problem (i.e., a fancy build server).

It's close to having no known issues not present in CyanogenMod itself, but that's not enough. The builds are currently run through basic tests before uploading, and that needs to be replaced with running the full suite of tests for each release.

TH: Where do you think Android security should go in the future? What would be necessary to happen for Android to be considered one of the most secure operating systems around, and how feasible would that be?

DM: Android on Nexus devices, and other devices, is quite a different beast due to the availability of updates and the lack of poor quality vendor modifications. Those problems are often discussed and [are] not particularly interesting, so I'll focus only on Nexus devices.

Android is already a leader when it comes to access control. It ships with an incredibly well-crafted full system SELinux policy. There are no unconfined processes on the system, and any permissions that aren't required end up being removed. Android is also improving SELinux for other Linux distributions, with features like the ioctl filtering introduced in 6.0 (kernel attack surface reduction). The willingness to make backwards incompatible changes to improve the system's access control means that the mistakes of the past are being corrected. This is where mobile operating systems are way ahead of traditional ones, and Android is particularly good at it. Android 6.0 also leapfrogged both iOS and CyanogenMod when it comes to user control over permissions.

On the other hand, Android isn't really a leader when it comes to other aspects of security. This is starting to change in the development branch, where a lot of work is going into enabling automatic integer overflow checking for C and C++ code. There's a lot more that can be done here, but a lot of it involves making performance sacrifices, so there's a lot more room to do it in a more security-focused OS like CopperheadOS. Android's code also needs a lot of improvement, both via cleaning it up and modernizing it, and more focused efforts to find bugs via auditing and fuzzing. It's not particularly bad compared to other software projects, though. Despite all of the attention directed at the stagefright library, it is really not much worse than alternatives like FFmpeg (if at all) and is quickly improving.

Android does already enable more exploit mitigation features than other mainstream Linux distributions (stack smashing protection, full ASLR and full RELRO across the board without exceptions, etc.), but it's comparable to the mitigations enabled by Apple in iOS and lags behind the exploit mitigations adopted by Microsoft's operating systems. The standard C library (Bionic) is more secure than the traditional glibc implementation used on Linux thanks to being pretty close to a port of the OpenBSD libc to Linux with additional hardening features.

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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.

When we were in Barcelona way back in February, Ron Louks, BlackBerry's head of devices, briefly teased a curved-screen slider phone at the end of its Mobile World Congress presentation. It looked very slick, a potential comeback device, but the brief reveal left us with many questions that wouldn't be answered for months. Still, it gave die-hard BlackBerry fans hope that it could still pull something amazing out of the bag after its slow and steady decline in handset market share.

It wasn't until earlier this summer that we started to hear more about this upcoming device (then called the "Venice"), and all the rumors pointed to it running Android instead of BlackBerry's in-house OS BlackBerry 10 (BB10). Although this was probably a disappointment to many fans of the Canadian company, realistically, we all knew that if it was going to stay in the device game, moving to Android was the BlackBerry's only option and the only way to close the app gap.

In the fall, the rumors turned to a deluge of leaks with pictures and even hands-on videos of an Android phone BlackBerry had yet to announce formally. When it did confirm its existence at the end of September, we learned that it was to be called the "Priv" and that it "combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity" with Android.

Although all the unofficial info pointed to what looked like a great device, we were still skeptical. We questioned if BlackBerry still had the expertise to build a secure OS and software on a completely new platform, especially after the talent departures from all the layoffs. We also weren't sure if a device with a hardware keyboard, slide-out or not, was still viable in this age of all-touch phones.

To answer those questions, BlackBerry was able to get us a demo unit, and we've been testing it out for the past week. We know our headline makes a bold statement, but it isn't mere hyperbole. The Priv hits the mark in so many areas, from its FIPS 140-2 certified enhanced security, hardware specs, design and software, and in the short time we've had it, we've been seriously impressed.

Specifications

A Signature Feature You Never Have To Use

Let's start by talking about the hardware keyboard, the signature feature of nearly every BlackBerry phone and what sets them apart from everyone else (yes, we do know there are some all-touch BlackBerrys, too). On the Priv, it slides out from the bottom with a satisfying snap (with just the right amount of force needed to activate the movement), the same way as the awful BlackBerry Torch and the not so awful Dell Venue Pro (a short-lived Windows Phone from 2010).

The backlit four-row keyboard is well laid out, and the keys have a nice tactile feel, but due to the constraints of the width of the Priv, the keys are on the small side. The whole thing does feel a bit cramped, especially when compared to the spacious keyboard of the Passport, but for users used to the smaller keyboards on other BlackBerrys like the Classic, the Priv's keyboard is going to offer a similar (as in good) typing experience.

The Priv is also perfectly balanced, even when the keyboard is open. When the screen slides up, the weight doesn't shift much, so it isn't top heavy. When you flip it over, you can see that BlackBerry has carefully engineered the sliding display to be as light as possible while still being very rigid.

The beauty of the Priv's design is when you don't need the keyboard, it just slides away -- this applies to both hardware keyboard lovers and those who don't ever think they'll use it. When closed, the Priv is as almost slim (with the curved sides making it feel even thinner) as many of the leading smartphones that don't have this feature, so if need be, you can simply pretend it's an all touch phone. The onscreen BlackBerry keyboard is also excellent and is an Android enhanced version of BB10's soft keyboard with the same feature of word suggestions that you can use an upward flick gesture to select.

There is also one bonus feature of the keyboard that I've fallen in love with. The entire keyboard is touch sensitive (like the Passport's) and acts as a trackpad below the screen. Even if you never type on it, the keyboard is awesome for scrolling through web pages, long emails, and your Twitter feed without ever having to touch the screen. There are some other neat tricks that you can perform with this feature, such as being able to move the cursor around when composing text. Other features of the keyboard also include being able to assign shortcuts (such as opening a particular app) when long pressing on a key, and typing on the keyboard on the home screen starts a universal search.

Curved, But Not That Curved

The other hardware feature you'll notice immediately is the Priv's curved display. At first glance, it looks to be the same as the curved screens on the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge and edge+, but on closer inspection, the curve of the Priv's screen doesn't wrap around the edges as far as its Korean rivals'.

The Canadian phone has wider bezels on the sides of the display, which means that despite having a smaller 5.4-inch display, the Priv is still a big phone and is a similar size to other Android devices with 5.7-inch screens such as the Nexus 6P and Galaxy Note 5, at least in width. Both those phones are taller than the Priv, but overall none of these phones are practical to use with one hand.

The screen itself is a plastic AMOLED QHD panel covered in Gorilla Glass 4 that has impressed in the short time we've used the Priv, but we haven't been able to test its brightness or color accuracy yet. Naturally, being an AMOLED panel, the Priv display's colors err on the over-saturated side, but not unpleasantly so, and in the settings you can adjust both white balance and saturation if the defaults are not to your liking.

The curved sides of the Priv's screen aren't utilized as much as those of its Samsung competitors; one reason for this, of course, is that its gentler curve allows for less area for the software to utilize. That means there is no equivalent to the edge display features of the Galaxy S6 edge. What BlackBerry does use it for is to show a battery level bar that runs down the side when charging and for a tab that, when swiped, opens an overlay that lets you peek at your current calendar events, unread messages, tasks and shortcuts to your favorite contacts. The Priv also supports Google's ambient display feature, so when you get a new notification with the phone asleep, you'll see it in the middle of the darkened screen in white.

Premium Materials And Design

Despite the shortcomings of the BB10 OS on its previous flagship devices, there's no argument that BlackBerry's flagship phones have always been well-designed devices made from premium materials. Metal has long been a major aspect of its high-end phones, along with attractive (though certainly more professional than fashionable) design and other durable materials. For example, although the Passport wasn't a device I'd own due to its oddball form-factor, the recently released Silver Edition is one of the best-looking handsets to come out this year.

The Priv is no different; it's a solid-feeling device that stands out from a sea of similar-looking Android phones with its curved screen, metal accents, and matte black sides. There are only two misses for me in its design: The soft-touch finish of the curved back (that looks to be the same material used on the Q10 and Z30) isn't as nice as the textured back of the Silver Edition Passport. I'm also not a big fan of the polished metal power and volume controls. A brushed-metal finish similar to the surround of the screen would have looked better.

(Almost) Premium Specs Combined With A Huge Battery

As you can see from the specification chart above, the Priv is powered by Qualcomm's Hexa-Core Snapdragon 808 SoC. This chip is certainly one of the most powerful mobile SoCs available, but it isn't the best, and at the Priv's price point there may be an expectation that one would get the best of the best. However, although the issues with the more powerful Snapdragon 810 have been conquered by many OEMs, it's still a hotter and more power-hungry chip. With the Priv's sliding screen restricting the space in the lower-half of its chassis, perhaps it just wasn't feasible to squeeze in the 810.

Other than the SoC, everything else about the Priv's internal hardware is top-end, with 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, microSD expansion and a huge 3,410 mAh battery. The combination of this battery and the 808 SoC should lead to impressive battery life, but this is something we still need to test, of course. So far, our experience with the Priv has shown that getting a full day of use out of it won't be a problem – BlackBerry claims you'll get up to 22.5 hours of mixed usage. It also supports Quick Charge 2.0 and dual mode (PMA and Qi) wireless charging, at least that is for models sold in the U.S. For some reason, the Canadian model does not have wireless charging.

The Priv's front-facing speaker below the screen is unfortunately not stereo, but it is very loud, so although it's perhaps not the best for music or video, it's going to be great for speakerphone conference calls. The Priv does not have a fingerprint reader, and for such a security-focused device, that's a perplexing omission. It also still uses a USB 2.0 port for charging instead of a USB Type-C port.

Camera That Checks All The Boxes

Although previous BlackBerrys have had decent cameras, this aspect wasn't ever something that particularly stood out. The Passport's 13MP camera was the first that BlackBerry seemed to pay a bit more attention to, having OIS (optical image stabilization) and an f/2.0 lens, and the Priv's 18MP camera is even better (apart from its aperture). It's certified by Schneider-Kreuznach and has OIS, PDAF (phase detect autofocus), a 6-element f/2.2 lens, a dual-color dual LED flash and shoots 4K video.

The one question we initially had about the camera was whose sensor did it use, because we couldn't think of an 18MP sensor that had those features listed. What we discovered from talking to BlackBerry is that it isn't actually 18MP, but a larger sensor that is cropped due to the need to have the optics closer to the sensor than normal. This is so the camera package can still be slim enough to fit in the space of the lower-half of the Priv's chassis and still incorporate OIS. Knowing that, and looking at the list of features, we can deduce that the sensor is most likely a cropped 21MP Sony IMX230 Exmor RS, one of the best currently available. This sensor, combined with OIS, should allow for excellent low light photos, a weakness of so many phone cameras.

Again, we haven't had the Priv long enough to test out its camera properly, but our initial impression is that it is capable of shooting comparable images to some of the best smartphone cameras, which is impressive. Our only disappointment so far is that its camera software is currently fairly basic, with no manual controls. What's worse is that the Priv's OS does not support Google's Camera2 APIs, so you can't use a third-party camera app for manual control. We hope this is something BlackBerry will fix soon, and the camera app has already been updated since we started testing the Priv to address multiple issues, such as focus time and image processing speed.

Security-Focused (Almost) Stock Android

Although the Priv's hardware is excellent, the real story of this phone is its software, as it's the first BlackBerry to run Android. Despite the fact that BB10 could run Android apps, they could only be acquired through the Amazon App Store (with its limited selection) or sideloaded, and even then, without Google Play Services many didn't work. Yes, you could hack BB10 to install Play Services and even the Google Play Store, but this wasn't something the average user could do. The Priv is a "proper" Android phone with full access to the Play Store.

There are many who think that BlackBerry should have switched to Android sooner, but to be honest, until Lollipop, we don't think that Google's OS was secure enough of a base on which to build a fully secure platform. Even then, BlackBerry has still had to do a lot of work in further enhancing and hardening Lollipop. BlackBerry also announced this week that it will commit to providing at the least monthly security updates to the Priv that will not be controlled by carriers, and that it will also push out hot fixes for critical security issues soon after the vulnerabilities are identified and patched.

Despite the additional work under the hood, BlackBerry has wisely kept the Priv's UI and UX close to stock Android Lollipop, with all its Material Design flourishes. The overall look and feel of the Priv is similar to a Nexus device running Android 5.1.1, with the same standard quick settings panel, Lollipop-style notifications, dialer, settings menu and more. It's not completely stock, though, and the Priv has a modified launcher with a vertically scrolling app drawer, optional pop-up widgets, and a complete different multi-tasking screen with a tiled layout.

Along with all the hardening of the OS, BlackBerry has also ported over some of the best features of BB10 to Android, such as the BlackBerry Hub, one of the best universal inbox applications available. It also naturally comes with BBM and other core BlackBerry apps, such as an improved calendar. All of these applications are found in the Play Store, so they can be updated independently of the core OS. That's a good thing for early adopters, because we have seen some instability and app crashes while using the Priv, and we have already received updates to many of its BlackBerry apps over the past week to fix these problems.

Another significant application is DTEK by BlackBerry, which scans the phone for security issues, such as what kind of screen lock you have set, and it makes suggestions on how to improve the phone's security level. The app also gives you more insight into application permissions, but because the Priv is not running Marshmallow with its improved permissions control, you don't have granular control of these permissions. Another security feature for business users is the ability to separate work and personal data on the same device. Surprisingly (given that BlackBerry pioneered this feature in BB10), the Priv uses Google's Android for Work instead of an in-house solution.

Since there is much to talk about when it comes to the Priv's software, we can't go over all of it in this first-look, but it's easily the most impressive part of the phone. When we heard that BlackBerry was going to go Android, we didn't know what to expect. We weren't sure if it was going to try to recreate every aspect of BB10, including its gesture-based UI but with Android (which would have been a disaster), or create a heavily-skinned security-focused fork of Google's OS.

By doing neither of the above and creating an OS that is on the surface familiar to Android users, the Priv becomes easily accessible and enticing to users of other Android devices. At the same time, bringing over the best of BB10 to Android not only improves the OS but also helps make the transition to Android easier for those coming from BB10. Finally, for users whose primary focus is security, the stock Android UX of the Priv is superior to that of other hardened Android devices like the Blackphone or the Granite Phone.

I'm sure one of the questions at the top of everyone's mind is when the Priv will get Android 6.0, and as of now the best answer we could get from BlackBerry is the "new year." Because it has more work to do hardening and securing the base OS that most other Android OEMs don't have to do, it's no surprise that it will take a little longer to get the update out. To be honest, though, Marshmallow doesn't have enough major differences to Lollipop to make its absence from the Priv a significant issue.

Everybody, BlackBerry's Really Back

It looks like BlackBerry has succeeded on nearly every front (both hardware and software) in making an outstanding mobile device that you'll want to own. The Priv looks great, is made from premium materials and has powerful specs, a huge battery and an excellent camera. It also runs a hardened version of Android Lollipop, yet comes with an almost stock UI instead of an overbearing and unattractive skin. There is very little app bloat, and the additional BlackBerry-included apps only improve on the core Android experience rather than detract from it, as so many OEMs applications do.

There is more to the Priv (especially its software), much more so than many of the other recently-released Android handsets that have started to become more of the same. But that goes beyond the scope of this article.

The BlackBerry Priv is available in the U.S. and Canada directly from BlackBerry unlocked for $699 USD and $899 CDN. Although those prices aren't exactly low, after using the Priv, we'd have to say that they are fair. This is a premium phone that is comparable in every way to other premium Android devices, and the Priv's pricing compares favorably, as well.

Yes, the argument could be made that perhaps BlackBerry should have sold it at a lower price to make it accessible to more people, but we see this as a halo device designed to showcase what it can do with Android, expertise that may then trickle down to future cheaper devices. Still, if some of the Priv's unique aspects (extra security, keyboard) are not as important to you, there are quite a few other Android devices (like the Nexus 6P) that are as good as the Priv but considerably cheaper.

The unlocked model bought directly from BlackBerry will start shipping on November 9. It is also available from various retailers and carriers starting today. In the U.S., it will be sold by AT&T and B&H, and in Canada by Bell, Eastlink, Rogers, SaskTel, Telus, Wind Mobile and NCIX.

Update, 11/6/15, 10:30am PT: Minor change to wording in camera section clarifying aperture differences.

Alex Davies is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware, covering Smartphones, Tablets, and Virtual Reality. You can follow him on Twitter. 

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Starting today, the BlackBerry Priv is available for pre-order in the U.S., Canada, and UK. The Priv is BlackBerry's first Android-based smartphone and is focused on delivering one of the most private and secure experiences for the company's customers, whether it's in the consumer or the enterprise market.

The BlackBerry Priv is an Android 5.1.1 device that sets itself apart from the rest of the Android devices with a renowned BlackBerry keyboard, at a time when few if any Android devices come with a keyboard anymore, and a greater focus on security, which is something we've mainly seen from smaller companies such as Silent Circle (BlackPhone) and Sikur (GranitePhone).

The device brings a hexa-core 64-bit Snapdragon 808 processor (dual-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A57 and quad-core 1.4 Cortex-A53 CPU), a 5.4" OLED screen with 2540 x 1440 resolution, Gorilla Glass 4 protection, 3 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage.

The Priv also seems to have a good camera, at least as far as specifications go: 18MP BSI2 stacked sensor, Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), Phase Detect Auto Focus (PDAF), 6-element f/2.2 lens, dual-LED flash, 4K video recording at 30 FPS, 1080p video recording at 60 FPS, 6 DOF video stabilization on top of the OIS, and more.

The front-facing camera doesn't look nearly as impressive, though. It has only a 2MP fixed-focus sensor, f/2.8, and 720p video recording. The good parts about it is that it has 1.75um pixels, which in theory should make it a good camera in low-light, and it also comes with electronic image and video stabilization.

The new BlackBerry phone comes with a relatively large battery of 3,410 mAh, which the company said should last 22.5 hours of "mixed usage." The device also supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth 4.1, and FD-LTE (bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 20, 29, 30).

We still don't know exactly all of the Priv's privacy and security features, but the phone is rumored to come with a Grsecurity kernel, which should make it one of the toughest devices when it comes to protection against exploits.

The company officially revealed that a DTEK app will come pre-installed and will warn users against weak privacy settings and other threats. BlackBerry also promised easy-to-customize privacy settings, picture-passwords, and some kind of confinement to further secure certain apps.

The BlackBerry Priv can now be pre-ordered for $700 in the U.S., while in Canada it can be had for $900 CAD.

Update, 10/23/15, 1:15pm PT: Added new image.

______________________________________________________________________

Lucian Armasu has joined Tom’s Hardware since early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

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The Priv will be BlackBerry's first Android-based smartphone, but unlike most other Android smartphones, the company promised to take a strong stance on protecting the privacy and security of the user.

The company claimed that it's going to employ a number of features to achieve the higher standard of privacy and security.

State-Of-The-Art Technical Security

The company has made significant improvements to the Priv's core to increase its security and privacy. One of the earlier rumors said that it would use the Grsecurity suite of kernel security enhancements, which should make the Priv nearly invulnerable against kernel exploits.

Although the Grsecurity patch will use its many protections to enhance the security of the Priv's kernel, Android's Linux kernel is still somewhere around 15 million lines of code, which is about 150 times larger than the much smaller BlackBerry 10 QNX-kernel. In other words, it's still a large target, and exploiting it shouldn't be impossible. However, it should be significantly more secure against zero-day attacks than most, if not all, Android devices out there.

Another security feature that BlackBerry unveiled recently is the picture-login mechanism, which was introduced in BlackBerry OS 10.2.1 and is now present on the Android-based Priv. The way it works is that it lets the user match numbers with part of a picture, which should make it both easy to use and hard for an automated bruteforce tool to crack the login password.

Private Communications

BlackBerry enumerated a number of private communication tools that the Priv supports, including the company's own BBM Meetings, which is a private conference tool; WatchDox for private file sharing; and SecuSUITE for private calls. In addition, the Priv will also have access to the Play Store and other apps such as TextSecure/Signal, Silent Phone, Whatsapp, Line, and so on.

Privacy Monitoring And Configuration

Although it doesn't mention exactly how it's doing it, BlackBerry said that it will give Priv owners the ability to control "security-critical" device resources. This will likely be implemented through some kind of permission control system that may work for some, but not all permissions. It's unlikely to work as well as the new permission control system from Android Marshmallow, but the Priv will arrive with only Android 5.1.1 on board at launch.

The company also said the phone will come with the DTEK warning system app, which sounds like some kind of anti-malware tool. Users will be able to see their privacy settings presented simply, making it easier to understand what's going on.

Fast Vulnerability Patches

BlackBerry noted that what sets it apart from other smartphone OEMs is that it has a "world-class" security team that can quickly respond to major vulnerabilities in its operating systems, before they affect the users. Considering that vulnerability patches are one of the top ways to keep devices safe against malware and hackers, it's good to know that BlackBerry intends to take updating its Android-based devices seriously.

The company plans to publish more blog posts about the Priv's security features in the coming weeks. The phone still doesn't have an official release date yet, but there's a pre-registration page where people can sign up and expect to receive notice of the phone's launch in the near future.

______________________________________________________________________

Lucian Armasu joined Tom's Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

BlackBerry launched the pre-registration page for its BlackBerry Priv device to get potential customers more excited about the company's first ever secure Android smartphone.

BlackBerry also revealed some specs about the device, which include a 5.4" dual-curved screen, a rather large 3,410 mAh battery (BlackBerry used to be known for its long-battery life smartphones after all), physical keyboard (making it one of the few companies to still offer one), a Schneider-Kreuznach certified camera, and "extraordinary audio quality."

The company also said the phone will come with a "DTEK" warning system, which will protect user privacy. BlackBerry didn't offer any further information about this feature.

From previous leaks and rumors, it came out that the Priv will indeed be a device that focuses heavily on security and privacy. One of the biggest features will be the kernel enhancements the Priv will presumably have thanks to the Grsecurity suite of kernel patches.

Another rumor was about a "Safeguard" feature, which will supposedly confine apps in more secure sandboxes than what's available by default on Android (although if this is really about just removing permissions, Android 6.0 Marshmallow is already able to do that).

BlackBerry has been doing increasingly worse in the smartphone market in the past few years, in no small part because the market has decided that there are only two main platforms: Android and iOS. Of those two, with iOS locked down by Apple, BlackBerry can only use Android for its phones, but it has delayed doing that until the very last moment.

When it moved from the old BlackBerry OS platform, instead of moving to Android, it decided to buy QNX and turn it into BlackBerry 10 OS to give it one more try with their own OS, before it considers moving to Android. Right now, it doesn't look like the BlackBerry 10 OS has done much to help its sales, as they have continued to decline.

An Android phone alone is unlikely to turn BlackBerry's fortunes around within a year, but if it sees progress, the company may be persuaded to continue to improve and even expand its line of secure Android smartphones. In the meantime, BlackBerry 10's future is uncertain, but it's hard to believe there will be room for both operating systems, especially if the Priv does well and both consumers and enterprise customers are quickly adopting it.

The BlackBerry Priv could be out by the end of the year, but to know exactly when that will happen you must register to BlackBerry's pre-registration page.

______________________________________________________________________

Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

You can follow him at @lucian_armasu. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Silent Circle announced the Blackphone 2. The new model comes with a 64-bit octa-core processor, the "Spaces" feature to create up to four isolated environments, and access to the Google Play Store.

Security And Updates

Silent Circle created the Blackphone in a time when Android phones weren't getting too many security updates, or the updates came too late to be effective for a phone that's supposed to protect the privacy and security of activists or enterprise users. Things have changed a little since then, with the discovery of the Stagefright vulnerabilities, but not significantly more.

The Blackphone's primary focus is strong security and privacy through secure communications applications, but also by having an OS that better protects against hacking and can be patched up as soon as a new vulnerability is discovered and before it can affect too many users. This makes it much better suited for activists and journalists, but also for enterprise customers where data security is critical.

Specs And Price

The Blackphone 2 comes with a premium flagship price tag of $799, but its processor doesn't seem to jibe much with that cost. The device uses an octa-core Snapdragon 615, which utilizes the lower-end Cortex-A53 CPU cores (although clocked at up to 1.7 GHz). This is a strange choice considering that this is a device that's supposed to deal with so much encryption and with multiple isolated domains at the chip level and thus should have as much performance as possible.

Other features include a 5.5" 1080p display protected by Gorilla Glass 3, 32 GB of storage, microSD support for another 128 GB, 3 GB of RAM, a 13MP camera on the back, and a 5MP camera on the front. The phone also has a 3,060 mAh battery and LTE support.

Blackphone 2 vs BlackBerry Priv

The Blackphone 2 may not be the only game in town anymore when it comes to easily accessible sub-$1,000 security-focused smartphones, as BlackBerry plans to introduce its own secure phone soon, called the BlackBerry Priv. Not much is officially known about it yet, but one way in which the Priv one-ups the Blackphone 2 is by using a hardened kernel by applying the well known and highly-effective Grsecurity suite of exploit mitigations.

Blackphone 2's isolated "Spaces" is a strong security feature in its own right as well, because it can keep personal stuff and work completely separated from each other, so if you get infected in one environment, the malware can't cross into the other environment. However, not having a well protected kernel can also lead to serious vulnerabilities and exploits, and each environment could get hacked more easily. This is why we have competition, though, and both companies can learn from each other as they build their next-generation devices and operating systems.

Blackphone 2 also continues to have better support for end-to-end encrypted calls and texts by default, although now that the BlackBerry Priv is based on Android, it could also get access to either the Silent Phone app from the Play Store or the open source TextSecure and RedPhone apps made by Open Whisper Systems.

The competition for security-focused devices seems to be heating up, and this should ultimately bring more security enhancements to the mainstream Android operating system, especially if companies such as Silent Circle and BlackBerry contribute back to the community and open source their code.

Silent Circle's Blackphone 2 can now be purchased in North America from the company's web store for $799.

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BlackBerry announced that it's oft-rumored Android-based phone, the Blackberry Priv (formerly called "Venice") is real. According to John Chen, BlackBerry's CEO, the phone's name is derived from the word "privacy," because privacy and security are at the core of the company's products.

“Today, I am confirming our plans to launch Priv, an Android device named after BlackBerry's heritage and core mission of protecting our customers' privacy. Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform," said Chen.

BlackBerry also said that it will support Google's "Android at Work" service on its BES12 enterprise platform, but other than that we know little about what kind of security and privacy features the Priv will bring for enterprise customers (and potentially for consumers, as well).

There was a rumor a few days ago that the Android kernel on the BlackBerry Priv will come integrated with Grsecurity, which is a whole suite of mitigations and protections against kernel attacks.

"Grsecurity is an extensive security enhancement to the Linux kernel that defends against a wide range of security threats through intelligent access control, memory corruption-based exploit prevention, and a host of other system hardening that generally require no configuration. It has been actively developed and maintained for the past 14 years. Commercial support for grsecurity is available through Open Source Security, Inc.," reads the company's website.

Grsecurity is largely regarded as a top-notch solution for security hardening for any Linux-based operating system. However, in practice, not too many mainstream Linux distros have adopted it, mainly because it's not integrated into the official Linux kernel itself, which can lead to breaking legacy code.

One of Grsecurity's components, called PaX, which is not developed by the Grsecurity developers but comes bundled with the kernel patch, is also being used in the CyanogenMod-based and security enhanced Copperhead OS. Right now, the open source Copperhead OS is still in Alpha and is only available for the Nexus 5 and the Galaxy S5.

Increased adoption of such features is already showing a trend that privacy- and security-conscious device makers are starting to adopt more hardcore security enhancements for Android, to make them better suited (especially) for the enterprise environment.

Silent Circle's BlackPhone, which has become a competitor of sorts to BlackBerry's phones in the enterprise, mainly because of its secure communication applications, doesn't include such kernel security enhancements yet, but there's little reason why it shouldn't in the future. If BlackBerry's bigger popularity makes this a "must-have" solution for enterprise customers, then we could see others adopt it, including Google for AOSP.

Samsung also open-sourced KNOX last year, but it's not clear yet whether the BlackBerry Priv uses it (although Android Lollipop, on which the Priv seems to be based, does use parts of it). KNOX enhances the security of each layer of Android, from hardware to applications, and has been largely effective against root exploits in the past. It has also already been approved by multiple government agencies. BlackBerry started supporting Samsung KNOX devices on its BES12 platform, so at least we know it considers KNOX a rather strong security solution for enterprise devices.

According to rumors, the BlackBerry Priv may also come with the company's own "Safeguard" solution, which seems to allow users to further confine applications, likely by removing permissions from them.

BlackBerry also noted that it will continue to improve its BlackBerry 10 operating system, which it developed based on the QNX acquisition. BlackBerry 10 was supposed to be the "modern answer" to Android and iOS, but the lack of a strong ecosystem (despite the support for repackaged Android applications) hampered its success.

As it tries to avoid a similar fate to Nokia's (that is, being either acquired or forgotten), the company seems to now be exploring its options with an Android-based device, while also ensuring that it does everything to make its Android version as secure as it possibly can be. That's why adopting the rumored Grsecurity kernel patch seems like a great idea.

The company said that BlackBerry Priv should be available by the end of the year, but more details will come out in the next few weeks.

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At BlackBerry's recent annual shareholders meeting, CEO John Chen said that he doesn't "want to give up the hardware business" and that he feels his company still has "a shot at still making money in it." He said this after the latest round of rumors saying that BlackBerry was going to finally exit the phone hardware business.

BlackBerry at one time was the leading smartphone platform, but it now has an almost non-existent market share, especially in the U.S., and many question why it doesn't completely transform into the software and services business it has basically become. Still, whether it is the right direction or not, Chen thinks there is a market for new hardware, and BlackBerry's phones still have a vocal and passionate fan base. With that in mind, BlackBerry announced today an updated version of its flagship phone, the Passport – the Silver Edition.

Notice how we said "updated." This is not a new Passport phone with different specs. It has the same 4.5-inch square screen, 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 801 SoC, 3 GB of RAM, 13MP camera with OIS, 32 GB of storage and a 3,450 mAh battery as the original Passport released last September. What BlackBerry has done is take elements (the rounded corners) of the AT&T exclusive version of the Passport that was released earlier this year (check out our hands-on) and incorporated them into a more refined hardware design.

In a post on the official BlackBerry blog, Di Tao, BlackBerry's Senior Industrial Designer, described how the new design is stronger and improves antenna performance. It also has a new diamond pattern texture on its back for better grip and machined metal details around the rear camera that should protect the lens from being scratched better than the original design. The keyboard has also been improved, with the new model having the wider lower "chin" below the keys of the AT&T model. BlackBerry posted an unboxing of the Silver Edition, which you can see below.

On the software side of things, the Silver Edition runs the latest version of BlackBerry OS, 10.3.2. The BlackBerry OS now has a digital assistant, The BlackBerry Assistant, like its OS competitors, and supports BlackBerry Blend 1.2. Blend is an application that allows you to display data such as email, BBMs, texts and contacts from a BlackBerry phone on Mac and Windows desktops, and iOS and Android tablets.

The Passport can also run Android apps, either officially through the pre-installed Amazon Appstore, or via sideloaded .apk files of apps not available on Amazon. For the more adventurous, you can also, with a bit of tinkering, get the Google Play Store and Play Services running on the Passport too, turning it into a "full" Android phone.

The BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition is available in North America today as an unlocked phone on BlackBerry's website. It goes for $550 in the U.S. and $650 in Canada. To sweeten the deal, BlackBerry is also throwing in $130 USD ($150 CAD) worth of accessories (shown above) if you buy it direct – a Flex Shell, Flip Case, and Sync Pod.

It will also be coming to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands in the next few weeks, both directly from BlackBerry and from Amazon.com, Carphone Warehouse and Selfridges.

While BlackBerry devices do serve a niche market now, we do think there is still a need for a high-end device with a great hardware keyboard, and the Passport fills that need. Its square form factor isn't for everyone and is certainly unique, but we quite liked the time we spent with the original Passport, and the Silver Edition looks like a much more attractive refined version.

Alex Davies is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware, covering Smartphones, Tablets, and Virtual Reality. You can follow him on Twitter. Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Pakistan's government recently issued an order to the country's three main ISPs, Mobilisk, Ufone and Telenor Pakistan, to ban all encrypted BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) communications.

The government had previously asked ISPs to alert it when Pakistani citizens use virtual private networks (VPNs) and has also blocked access to popular social networks such as Facebook because of "blasphemous" material found on them.

The Pakistani government said in the order that due to "serious concerns by the Security Agency," the three ISPs are to send a 90 days notice to all BES customers to close their BES connections, and to ensure that all of those connections are closed by November 30, 2015, "without fail."

Because enterprise BlackBerry customers use their own BES servers and their own keys to encrypt the exchanging of messages, that means the Pakistani government can't simply ask BlackBerry to give them the keys. However, it could be a way for the government to force BlackBerry to provide it with some kind of backdoor access to its enterprise customers' servers.

The Indian, Saudi and UAE governments have also banned or threatened to ban BlackBerry in the past, only for BlackBerry to later come up with a "solution" to satisfy or at least compromise with those governments.

For instance, in India, BlackBerry didn't give the government full access to its enterprise customers' communications, but it did give access to regular BBM communications, for which BlackBerry has the cryptographic key. Unlike, for example, TextSecure/Signal, BBM doesn't use end-to-end encryption, so the company can provide that kind of access to governments, when asked.

However, in this case, the Pakistani government may simply not accept any kind of compromise, especially if BlackBerry has already given it access to BBM messages. That would leave BlackBerry only two choices: either provide a backdoor to the government and risk further tarnishing its security reputation in the enterprise market, or accept that it can't sell BES licenses anymore in Pakistan.

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Today, BlackBerry and T-Mobile announced a partnership to make the BlackBerry Classic available to T-Mobile's network and its 57 million customers starting May 13.

“BlackBerry is proud to partner with T-Mobile once again to offer the world's most secure and reliable mobile products and services that encourage productivity − whether they are individual users making the most of their day with the BlackBerry Classic, or an enterprise seeking to manage thousands of devices," said John Chen, BlackBerry Executive Chairman and CEO. “Together with T-Mobile, we hope to deliver highly differentiated solutions that appeal to our mutual users: the power professionals who depend on their smartphones to get things done and make things happen."

The Classic is BlackBerry's attempt to bring back the best features of the "BlackBerry" smartphone that many millions of people used to love before the iPhone and Android phones came along: iconic design, a physical keyboard and enterprise features.

The BlackBerry Classic brings some improvements to the old-style BlackBerrys such as having a touchscreen, a modern touch-optimized OS, and hundreds of thousands of applications thanks to the company's own app store as well as Amazon's store.

The device includes a 3.5" screen with a 720 x 720 resolution (yes, a square), a dual-core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, Adreno 225 GPU, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, 8MP camera with HDR, face detection and auto-focus, a 2MP front-camera, LTE and a 2515 mAh battery that the company claims will last for 22 hours.

The BlackBerry Classic will be available on T-mobile's website starting May 13, and from May 15 in T-mobile's retail stores. In brick-and-mortar locations, it will be available for $0 down with $18.33 monthly payments for 24 months, for a total cost of $440.

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Back at MWC, BlackBerry announced a new "all-touch" smartphone called the BlackBerry Leap, which was targeting mainly the mid range of the market with a $275 price tag. The device is now shipping in the U.S. and UK, and it will ship tomorrow to France and Germany, as well.

The BlackBerry Leap comes with the latest BlackBerry 10.3.1 OS and a Snapdragon S4 Plus processor, which is rather dated even for today's mid-range processors, such as the 64-bit Cortex-A53-based chips. The device has a 5.0" screen and only a 720p resolution. That's too low-res for some users, but it should help increase the battery life of the device. It has a 2,800 mAh battery, which according to the company gives the smartphone up to 25 hours of juice under mixed usage.

Other specs include 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, support for microSD expansion up to 128 GB, LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, FM radio, Miracast, DLNA, and GPS and GLONASS support. The phone also has an 8MP rear camera with an LED flash and a 2MP front camera. According to BlackBerry, despite the lack of a physical keyboard, the Leap still has a "best-in-class" software keyboard.

BlackBerry also added the "Blend" functionality to the Leap, which is a way to view the phone's contents on your PC. That includes access to the BlackBerry Hub, BBM, text messages, contacts, file manager, work browser, calendar and notifications.

The Leap supports not one, but two app stores: BlackBerry's own app store and Amazon's app store, which gives the device access to hundreds of thousands of Android apps. Not all Android apps will be there, but it includes some popular ones such as Pinterest, Candy Crush Saga, Cut the Rope 2, Kindle, SoundCloud and more.

BlackBerry also added "Device Guard" functionality, which is sort of an anti-virus that verifies the apps for known malware.

The Leap supports some strong encryption tools as well, although unfortunately, they can only be used by enterprise customers. These tools include:

Advanced Data at Rest Protection, which keeps data encrypted when not in usePGP email for end-to-end encryptionSupport for Kerberos authentication to retrieve public certificates for an LDAP directory for S/MIME

BlackBerry's new smartphone also comes with the Blackberry Assistant, which has deep integration into the BlackBerry Hub, Contacts and Calendar.

You can purchase the BlackBerry Leap for $275 in the U.S. from BlackBerry's store or from Amazon. The smartphone is also available in the UK for £199, France and Germany for €289 (shipping tomorrow), and is "coming soon" to Canada, India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Update, 4/24/15, 9:15am: Added hands-on video.

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BlackBerry announced today that it acquired WatchDox, a company that focuses on secure enterprise file sharing and syncing (EFSS) solutions based on DRM technology. BlackBerry wants to use the new acquisition to increase the security of its products and services for enterprise customers. The technology will be available with the company's BES12 mobile management solution for enterprise. BES12 supports BlackBerry phones, Windows phones, Samsung Knox devices and iPhones.

WatchDox's secure file-sharing technology allows end users to revoke access or delete the files remotely and also gives administrators the ability to lock the files or remove access to them in case of a breach.

After the recent major hacks of Sony, JPMorgan and others, companies seem much more interested in protecting their documents from becoming public or having their customers' data exposed. BlackBerry seems to want to target those companies as customers now by leveraging the WatchDox acquisition.

"Sharing data outside the corporate walls can significantly increase workforce productivity, but can open an enterprise to serious financial and reputational risk if not implemented with the proper control," said Maribel Lopez, Principal and Founder, Lopez Research. "WatchDox provides this control and truly focuses on data-centric security. Their enterprise file-sync-and-share technology will be an important enhancement to BlackBerry's cross-platform EMM portfolio, as it delivers new capabilities while ensuring the level of security that enterprises have come to expect from BlackBerry."

According to WatchDox's CEO and co-founder, Moti Rafalin, the main problem with security in most companies today is that they try to protect the data only at the network level or at the device level. That includes using network intrusion detection systems, firewalls, anti-viruses, malware analysis tools and so on, but few actually protect the data itself.

This usually happens because encrypting the data would either make employees less productive, if the data protection and the sharing of that secured data isn't easily done, or because the higher-ups believe the other external methods of protection are sufficient.

To provide strong data protection, WatchDox believes a DRM solution is also needed. The idea is to make it so that files can't be accessed by anyone but authorized users, even if a breach happens and the files fall into the wrong hands. WatchDox technology also allows for the files to self-destruct when anyone but the intended users tries to access them.

The company also said its technology is easy to use, because if it wasn't and it interfered with the way companies do business, then the stronger security features would be disabled.

Although DRM can be useful to enforce limited access to files, it also has quite a long story of ending up being broken, regardless of the technology or implementation. WatchDox's technology may improve BlackBerry's existing security solutions as well as help the company expand into new cloud services markets, but it likely can't guarantee the data of its future customers will not be breached.

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Last week we told you about BlackBerry's CES announcement of its new(ish) AT&T specific version of the Passport. Rounded corners, rather than the squared-off ones on the original model, are the obvious change for this iteration. In fact, the design of the AT&T Passport looks a lot more like the new BlackBerry Classic (shown in the image further down this post).

While we were at CES, we were able to get a brief hands-on with the new Passport, which you can see in the video below. We also included a quick look at the AT&T version of the Classic, too.

Prior to seeing the AT&T Passport, we spent a little time with the original version. While it's certainly not a device for everyone, we understand BlackBerry's design philosophy. BlackBerry still has a very loyal following and there are a lot of fans of this oddly shaped smartphone.

In my time using one, I found that there was a lot to like. It has powerful, up-to-date hardware, a great screen, good camera, outstanding battery life, and of course an amazing keyboard. BlackBerry also has expanded access to Android apps on their platform by using the Amazon Appstore. Also, since not every Android app is available from Amazon, especially those that require Google Play services, there are now unofficial and unsupported methods to install the Google Play store on the Passport. After doing this, you'll have access to nearly every Android app, although some apps, especially games, don't work well with the Passport's unique screen aspect ratio.

While working on this post, we noticed that the press images for the new Passport were dated October 21, so clearly the AT&T version of the Passport has been in the works for some time. When the Passport first launched in September, AT&T was announced as the exclusive U.S. carrier, but no release information was given. Apparently, AT&T was waiting for the redesigned version to become available. It's just a little odd that it took so long for it to be formally announced. Perhaps AT&T didn't think BlackBerry's latest could compete with the other phone releases of last fall, or it's simply that BlackBerry couldn't deliver enough units until now.

We asked BlackBerry if this well-rounded version of the Passport will ever be available on other carriers. While it's exclusive to AT&T for now, BlackBerry said it may be available from other carriers, or even directly from BlackBerry like the original Passport, in the future.

At CES 2015, we also got a quick look at the AT&T Classic. Unlike the Passport, there haven't been any changes apart from the addition of the AT&T logo on the back, as can be seen below.

The AT&T BlackBerry Passport does not have a hard release date yet, although it should be announced in the coming weeks. It will be offered for free on the AT&T Next plan, $200 with a two-year contract, and $650 outright. The AT&T BlackBerry Classic also doesn't have a release date yet and will be free on the AT&T Next plan, $50 with a two-year contract, and $420 outright. If interested, you can register on AT&T's site to be emailed when more information about their availability is released.

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Yesterday, BlackBerry announced that a redesigned BlackBerry Passport smartphone will be available exclusively on AT&T. The phone was redesigned after the carrier made a specific request that the phone should have rounded corners.

Ergonomically speaking, sharper edges could especially be a problem for the Passport because it is unusually wide for a modern smartphone.

“We value our continued partnership with AT&T and we look forward to launching the new and uniquely designed BlackBerry Passport device for AT&T customers in the U.S. Built with security at its core, the BlackBerry Passport stands apart from the rectangular-screen, all-touch devices in the market today, offering users more than a full day of battery life and new innovations, including the industry's first touch-enabled QWERTY keyboard." — Ron Louks, President, Devices and Emerging Solutions, BlackBerry

The BlackBerry Passport has a square 4.5-inch 1440x1440 screen, which is accompanied by a wider-than-usual "portrait" keyboard. It has a quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, microSD support up to 128GB, 13MP camera with OIS on the back and a 2MP camera with HD recording in front. The device also supports 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, and comes with a big 3450mAh battery.

The Passport comes with BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, which is based on the secure QNX operating system that BlackBerry bought a few years back.The OS includes apps and services such as BlackBerry Blend, which lets customers securely access messages and content; BlackBerry Assistant, a Siri-like voice-controlled personal assistant; and BlackBerry Hub, where users can see all of their notifications and emails in one place.

The BlackBerry Passport will be available in the near future for $0 down with a $21.64 per month AT&T Next 24 plan, $27.09 per month AT&T Next 18 plan or $32.50 per month AT&T Next 12 plan. The phone will also be available for $200 on a two year contract, or $650 unlocked. BlackBerry will announce additional availability (possibly in other countries) for the Passport in the coming weeks.

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Editor's Note: These deals have all expired. Check out our current list of best black friday deals.

BlackBerry really wants your business, enough so that it's willing to offer a nice discount this holiday season to iPhone consumers who "trade up" for the BlackBerry Passport. The promotion begins December 1, 2014 and ends on February 13, 2015, and the catch is that customers must purchase the Passport smartphone first before getting the refund.

The trade-up promotion includes the iPhone 4S up to the iPhone 6. All iPhone trade-ups receive a BlackBerry "Top-Up" credit of $150; thus, if customers turn in their iPhone 6, they receive up to $400 for the phone and the $150 discount, totaling up to $550. The older iPhone 4S is worth up to $240, the iPhone 5 up to $300, the iPhone 5C up to $280, and the iPhone 5S up to $385.

According to the FAQ, the trade-in value is determined by the iPhone's condition. The phone must be fully functional and void of any liquid-based damage, the user lock must be disengaged and the "Find My iPhone" feature disabled. There also should not be any bleeding or cracks in the screen, and the phone must have a valid ESN, IMEI or MEID number.

Customers are required to purchase the BlackBerry Passport from the BlackBerry online store in Canada or the United States, or Amazon. Once the phone is purchased, customers pack the iPhone with a Passport's proof of purchase and ship them off to BlackBerry. Customers will get their money within six weeks after BlackBerry inspects the phone and proof of purchase.

"Individual consumers will be paid via a Visa Prepaid Card from MetaBank and mailed to the address you provided on your quote, 6 weeks after the Trade-in Center receives both eligible device(s) and a valid proof of purchase(s) and confirms your eligibility for the program," states the FAQ.

The BlackBerry Passport made its debut on September 24, 2014. The phone has an unusual form factor, measuring 5.04 inches high, 3.56 inches wide and 0.36 inches thin. The screen is 4.5 inches square (1440 x 1440) and resides above a built-in QWERTY keyboard.

The Passport's hardware includes a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 clocked at 2.2 GHz, 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot for up to 128 GB of extra storage. The phone also sports a 13 MP camera on the back, a 2 MP camera on the front, dual-band Wireless AC, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and NFC connectivity and a number of sensors.

In addition to the iPhone promo, BlackBerry is offering a Black Friday promotion. Starting now and lasting until Sunday, the company will knock off $200 when customers order the phone online. That's a huge savings considering that the phone originally costs $699.

For more information about BlackBerry's Trade-up promotion starting next month, head here.

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BlackBerry has lost most of its once dominant market share (in the U.S.) arguably because it has refused for so long to change and adapt to the way modern touchscreen smartphones were being built.

In its decline, the company has decided that instead of fighting from a position of retreat against other touchscreen smartphones, it would aggressively push what once made BlackBerry phones iconic -- their design, solid build, and of course, physical QWERTY keyboard, all now made to work with the modern and advanced BlackBerry 10 operating system.

"BlackBerry Classic," which the company has just announced, is currently the best incarnation of this philosophy. According to BlackBerry, many of its customers have asked the company to provide them with a phone that comes with hardware which represents the BlackBerry phone the most, but with the power of the BlackBerry 10 OS.

The BlackBerry Classic is clearly targeted mainly at professional workers who are still very fond of their old BlackBerrys but want a more contemporary device that has access to many third party apps and a good browser. BlackBerry still has nowhere the kind of access to apps that Android and iOS platforms do, but it does work with both BlackBerry apps and Android apps that have been purposefully repackaged for BlackBerry by their developers.

BlackBerry has recently adopted the Amazon App Store as well, which gives users access to another 200,000 Android apps by default. The deal seems like a good move for both BlackBerry, which now gets more apps for its phones, but also Amazon, which now gets to have a wider market for its developers. Amazon has failed with its own Fire Phone, and only its tablets have been moderately successful. With BlackBerrys, Amazon gets access to a non-negligible number of phones that its third-party developers can support as well.

The new BlackBerry Classic supports the FD-LTE and HSPA+ bands, but it will not work with any CDMA networks (including Verizon, Sprint and US Cellullar). The company doesn't have an exact shipping date for the device, but it said the phone should start shipping around mid-December with an unsubsidized price of $450.

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Today, a published report from the technology news site Benzinga suggested that Blackberry is going to be acquired by Lenovo, which is expected to make an offer by the end of this week. The news led to a 6 percent surge in Blackberry's stock price. The source said that Lenovo could start by offering $15 per share, but that a deal will probably be made around $18 per share.

Almost two years ago, in January 2013, Lenovo's CEO Wong Wai Ming said that Blackberry was one of the companies it was considering buying. Early this year, Lenovo announced plans for its acquisition of Motorola, so many thought that Lenovo was done buying companies for a while. However, Lenovo seems to want to enter the western enterprise market, and one way to do that faster is to buy Blackberry.

Blackberry is not nearly as powerful as it once was in the smartphone market, but there are still over 91 million BBM users, and the company's brand is recognized in the enterprise as a smartphone brand for professionals.

Blackberry's CEO, John Chen, has also tried to focus more on services and the enterprise market lately, which means Lenovo doesn't have to start from scratch in terms of enterprise product and service development.

"Lenovo is serious about becoming a worldwide player," Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research told CBC News in an interview. "People want an answer to iOS or Android and there is BlackBerry with BB10."

BB10 is indeed a solid operating system, but it never had any chance against Android, iOS, or even Windows Phone and Microsoft's billion dollar investments. Lenovo has the money to push the platform harder, if not in the consumer market (where the company will probably focus more on Motorola), then in the enterprise market where it has a stronger name.

Lenovo also bought IBM's low-end x86 server business this year for $2.3 billion, another sign that the company is looking for new growth businesses. Lenovo is already the number-one PC manufacturer, but although PCs are still a cash cow for the company, it's not a big growth market anymore, so the growth needs to come from elsewhere.

The smartphone market is already quite large, but it has the potential to be several times larger as more people either buy a new smartphone for the first time or upgrade from an older one. With Motorola and Blackberry, Lenovo could gain two smartphone companies that have potential for growth, even if they are currently under-performing. That potential, combined with Lenovo's billions of dollars that it could invest in product development and marketing, could help Lenovo become a stronger global mobile company.

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Today, BlackBerry launched its rumored, almost-square-shaped Passport smartphone seemingly targeted at professionals and people who want to "get things done." The question is whether it actually succeeds in reaching that goal.

The new BlackBerry Passport has a square 4.5" screen with 1440 x 1440 resolution, which means it's quite sharp at 452 PPI. It has a tough plastic body typical of BlackBerry phones, reinforced with a stainless steel frame and Gorilla Glass 3 screen protection, so it should be quite durable.

It comes with a Snapdragon 800 processor, which is relatively old by today's flagship standards. However, it has 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of internal storage and a 13MP rear camera with OIS, which on paper are more competitive features.

The phone seems to have one of the largest batteries we've seen so far in smartphones, with a capacity of 3,450 mAh that should last for at least a full day of moderate to high usage (which should be expected from users who are focused on productivity).

The Passport runs BlackBerry 10.3, a revised version of the QNX-based BlackBerry OS we've seen for the past two years. It brings updated icons, a unified search bar, the BlackBerry Assistant (a competitor to Siri and Google Now) and the surprising addition of the Amazon Appstore.

It hasn't been easy for BlackBerry to promote itself as a solid alternative to the iOS and Android platforms when it has far fewer apps in its own BlackBerry World app store, but the Amazon Appstore should close the gap a little more and boost the Passport's appeal somewhat. BlackBerry's new CEO, John Chen, has mainly focused the company on mobile security and services that the company can offer even for competing platforms as its own customers adopt them and leave the BlackBerry platform. However, selling hardware can also bring significant revenue and profits to the company, if done right. With the BlackBerry Passport it looks like the company wanted to make a strong statement that it is still the company that focuses much more on its enterprise customers than any of its competitors.

It's not clear, however, whether the Passport is the right product to do that. Most people might find its almost square shape unappealing and strange. While the keyboard could be well built, it doesn't look like it's easy to use with one hand, which means even people who may prefer typing on a physical BlackBerry style keyboard may chafe at using it somewhat. Further, many smartphone owners have already gotten used to typing on touchscreen phones over the past few years, especially when swipe capabilities in some virtual keyboards can make one-hand typing even faster.

If BlackBerry is to make a strong comeback in the mobile market, it will likely need a product that has a much bigger mainstream appeal. Focusing on the small remaining market of hardcore BlackBerry users with a product like the Passport is probably not the best way to do that, even if those users really love the product – which is still something that we won't know until the company announces its next quarterly results.

BlackBerry will be selling the product for $249 on contract on AT&T's network and $599 unlocked from BlackBerry's online store in the U.S., Canada, UK, France and Germany. The phone should be available in 30 countries by the end of the year. BlackBerry 10.3 will also be coming to all BlackBerry 10 devices.

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Today, Blackberry announced that it has acquired a virtual SIM company called Movirtu. This seems like a move that's meant to help the company become stronger in the enterprise market, even as more enterprise customers start using Android and iOS devices instead of Blackberries.

Movirtu's virtual SIM solution allows a user to have both a personal and a work number on the same phone, even if the phone itself isn't a dual-SIM model. In fact, this solution can work on iPhones and on any Android device, too, which could be quite appealing to some enterprise customers if they want to let their employees use their own phones at work (BYOD) or want to let them use their personal numbers on the devices given by the company.

Since Blackberry's phones are barely relevant these days in terms of market share, new Blackberry CEO John Ceo is trying to restructure the company to focus on services such as mobile data security, something for which Blackberry used to be recognized (and still is somewhat), and mobile device management. Blackberry has a small window of opportunity to do this right and to convince enterprise customers that they should be using its services.

"In a BYOD and COPE world, there remain a number of efficiency and convenience challenges facing enterprises, employees and mobile operators alike," said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry. "The acquisition of Movirtu complements our core strategy of providing additional value added services, and it will leverage our key assets, including our BES platform, along with our existing global infrastructure which is connected to a large number of mobile operators around the world."

The virtual SIM capabilities will be provided by Blackberry through mobile operators around the world and on all major mobile platforms. Movirtu's virtual SIM solution will be joining other complementary Blackberry solutions for separating the personal environments from the work environments as a security measure, such as BlackBerry's Secure Work Space and BlackBerry Balance.

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BlackBerry today talked about two new devices it plans to release later this year, the Passport and the Classic. The Passport is the more interesting of the two (as the name implies, the Classic is a very traditional device in terms of appearance) and it looks like folks in the UK can expect this phone come September. Pocket-Lint cites BlackBerry as saying the Passport would be available in the UK and that it would have its own UK launch event in September. Not too surprising given the UK was among the first to get the Z10 but good news nonetheless.

This phone toes the phablet line with a twist: It reduces over all screen size and squeezes in a hardware keyboard, too. Similar to the Q10, the Passport has a square display but it ups the size to 4.5 inches and the resolution is 1440 x 1440 (as opposed to the 3.5-inch 720 x 720 display on the Q10). The phone is powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor and 3 GB of RAM along with a 3450 mAh battery. There’s also a 13-megapixel camera in the back, and a 2-megapixel camera up front.

No word on pricing just yet, but we’ll keep you posted on this unique device from BlackBerry.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Windows Phone Gets A New Flagship

Microsoft has a history of tenaciously pursuing a market once it sets sights on a target. Take the 1990s browser wars, for example. Or the continuing Xbox versus PlayStation saga. Although it often enters as a latecomer and underdog, Microsoft accomplishes some impressive feats when its back is against the wall. That's a perfect description of the mobile market right now, as Android seems unstoppable and iOS commands a strong second place.

But did you know that Microsoft surpassed Blackberry's market share in 2013, and shipped more than 10 million devices in Q4 of last year? Or that Windows Phone doubled its global smartphone OS market share in Q3, to just under one-third of Apple's? Now that it owns Nokia, there's little reason to believe that Microsoft will not do everything in its power to continue this momentum. And if you doubt its conviction, the software giant recently announced that it will drop the Windows royalty fee for devices with screens below nine inches. Perhaps it's a bit early to crown Android the victor in the battle for smartphone supremacy.

While Windows Phone 8 took big strides in the budget sector on Nokia's Lumia 520 (a phone that offers fantastic value on a pay-as-you go basis), most of us wouldn't aspire to own one. Nokia has a cutting-edge phablet (phone/tablet) in the Lumia 1520, but that form factor isn't for everyone. Windows Phone needs a flagship to prove it can compete against the Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy, and HTC One. It needs something in the 5" display category. Its answer arrives in the Lumia Icon, also known as the Nokia Lumia 930 to non-Verizon customers.

Given a strong spec sheet, the Icon/930 earns a position in the same tier as other high-end Android-based devices. Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 at 2.2 GHz, check. Adreno 330 graphics engine, check. Two gigabytes of LPDDR3, check. LTE support, check. Five-inch AMOLED 1080p screen with an impressive 441 ppi, check. Forward-looking 802.11ac wireless support, check. Twenty-megapixel camera, check. And although you don't get microSD expansion, 32 GB of on-board storage is nothing to sneeze at.

If those specifications look familiar, that's because the Icon and 930 share almost all of them with Nokia's Lumia 1520, which differentiates itself with a larger 6" IPS LCD display and memory card support. But again, a 6" screen classifies the 1520 as a phablet. In reality, the Icon/930 is more of a successor to the Lumia 1020, which could be considered the previous flagship Windows Phone device.

The Lumia Icon/930 improves upon its predecessor's specs in every way, except for imaging hardware. The Lumia 1020's xenon flash and 41 MP camera remain the tops optics in the smartphone industry, while the Icon employs a better-than-average 19.66 MP camera with a large 1/2.5" sensor and dual-LED flash. For what it's worth, that's also what you'll find in the Lumia 1520. And although the sensor doesn't sound as impressive as the Lumia 1020's, you also don't have to deal with a protruding bump on the Icon's chassis, either.

When you compare the Icon/930 to a contemporary device like Google's Nexus 5, the playing field narrows considerably. Both feature similar quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoCs, even if the Nexus' CPU cores operate at up to 100 MHz faster. The two phones similarly come equipped with Adreno 330 graphics, too. While both these phones have 5" 1920x1080 displays with 441 ppi pixel densities, the Nexus employs an IPS LCD compared to the Icon's AMOLED screen, giving Nokia an advantage in contrast levels and power usage.

Speaking of power, the Icon/930 has a slightly beefier 2420 mAh battery. And though the Lumia's 19.66 MP camera is a downgrade from the 1020, it certainly looks good on paper next to the Nexus 5's 8 MP sensor.

There's one technical difference between the Lumia Icon and 930: their on-board storage options. While the Lumia Icon comes with a mandatory 32 GB of space, the Lumia 930 has the option of 16 or 32 GB. Otherwise, available colors are all that separates them. More about that on the next page.

Design, Look, And Feel

The Lumia Icon isn't a flashy or colorful device. Unlike other Nokia models, there are no bright colors available. You choose between black and white. It's a businesslike, sharp, and understated phone. A cut, beveled edge surrounding the case is more reminiscent of an iPhone than it is the rest of the Lumia line. It's fine-looking. But Icon owners who want to express their personal style a bit more will want a case with pizazz.

The Lumia 930 features an identical platform, but is available in two additional colors: green and orange.

Up top, you can barely make out the nano-SIM tray next to the more prominent 3.5 mm headphone jack. The tray is atypical in that it requires no pin to remove; you simply pull it open with a fingernail.

The front face of the phone hosts a speaker/mic, with a 2 MP camera just to the right. There are three illuminated Windows Phone buttons right below the 5" screen, and another forward-facing microphone. "Another one," you ask? That's right. The Icon has four: two unidirectional mics up front and two multi-directional in the back.

You won't find anything interesting on the left side of the phone; instead, all of the buttons are on the right side. From the top, there's the volume rocker, a power button, and a camera button that protrudes a little more than the others. All three activate crisply. My only complaint is they're too easy to press accidentally. The power button is particularly susceptible to this, since it's right where your fingers rest while holding the phone.

Those pinholes in the back are the multi-directional mics. They're purportedly able to track a sound source as it moves during video capture, which is something you'll see us test. The 20 MP camera is in the top-center of the device (or the right in the photo above), with a dual-LED flash next to it. The speaker is on the bottom-right, with the phone standing up vertically.

The only connector on the bottom of the phone is a micro-USB charging/data port.

Compared to the Lumia 1020, Nokia's Icon/930 is the exact same width, slightly longer, a hair thinner, and a bit heavier. I certainly understand why this is the case, given the Icon's larger 5" screen. But make no mistake, Nokia's latest is neither small nor light. The increased size is forgivable considering the larger display, and it's only about two millimeters larger than the Nexus 5 in each direction.

At 166 grams, though, it is noticeably heavier than Google's 130-gram phone. On the other hand, it's also quite a bit lighter than the brick-like Lumia 920, a 185-gram beast that represented the ultimate manifestation of Windows Phone 8 when it launched.

The Lumia Icon rides a fine line between size, heft, and usability. I purchased a Lumia 920, but quickly exchanged it for an HTC 8x because the Nokia was just too cumbersome to haul around. And I'm definitely not prepared to put up with a phablet, either. But I can tolerate the Icon in my pocket all day. Its beautiful 5" screen makes that decision all the more easy to rationalize.

Nokia's Lumia Icon/930 feels sturdy in-hand, and there's no doubt as to its high-quality materials. I only wish it was easier to hold on to. You might not suspect it, but this fairly large smartphone slips through my fingers if I'm not careful. That's reason enough to enclose the Lumia in a case, which won't do the device any favors in the bulkiness department.

Windows Phone 8 And Nokia Software Tour

It's surprising to me how often other reviewers draw inaccurate, assumptive, and negative conclusions about Microsoft's mobile operating system. To be clear, I'm no iOS or Android hater, and when I first decided to give Windows Phone 8 a try more than a year ago, I was disappointed by the absence of important apps. The OS certainly had its shortcomings.

Fast forward to 2014, though, and I couldn't be happier with Windows Phone. Microsoft addressed its most irritating limitations (the screen orientation lock, the option to close apps manually, and support for Google accounts, for instance) over three major updates, demonstrating real commitment to the platform.

The soon-to-arrive Windows Phone 8.1 update promises even more functionality, such as the ability to install apps on an SD card. Speaking of Windows Phone 8.1, it will be the only operating system available for the upcoming Lumia 930. The Lumia Icon will probably be one of the first phones to get the OS upgrade, but for now it's a Windows Phone 8 device.

The apps themselves have improved substantially, and Microsoft's Windows Phone Store now boasts over 140,000 entries. But more important, glaring omissions like Instagram are finally available. In addition, Microsoft purchased the rights to distribute Nokia's excellent HERE suite of maps and turn-by-turn navigation applications to all Windows Phone users. The offline map download option is glorious if you're going off the grid or into roaming territory.

Windows Phone offers a middle ground between the Draconian restrictions of iOS and Android's Wild West. Unlike Google's operating environment, every model of Windows Phone you log in to delivers a similar experience, with no substantial interface customizations or surprises. Unlike iOS, file management and applications aren't as tightly restricted. That's a nice balance for folks who appreciate tight integration with Microsoft's accounts and services. As an enthusiast using all three operating systems on a day-to-day basis, I prefer the simplicity of Windows Phone 8's interface over either competitor.

For now, the only real exclusive software you'll find on the Icon is Verizon Tones and VZ Navigator, since the device is still limited to one carrier. Tones lets you choose from a catalog of ringtones, and also ringback tones (the sound people hear when they call you). VZ Navigator is turn-by-turn navigation software with some extra social, event, and point-of-interest functionality built-in. Unfortunately, I'm outside of Verizon's service area, and can't test either value-added app.

Otherwise, the Lumia Icon and 930 both have access to Nokia's proprietary software, so if you're coming from another manufacturer's platform, you may be surprised at the volume of extras. I do like that not all of Nokia's apps are pre-installed on the Icon. Rather, you have access to them through the Windows Phone Store. For example, Nokia MixRadio (formerly Nokia Music) has an excellent reputation as a music delivery service, although its importance is diminished with the availability of apps from Songza and Pandora.

Of course, you get Nokia's excellent camera app (more on that later), along with a plethora of associated software, such as Creative Studio (to add effects to pictures), Storyteller (an automatic timeline app for photos), Cinemagraph (a curious app that takes short animations from the camera instead of pictures or video), Video Trimmer, Care (a useful Windows Phone help resource), and Beamer (an app that streams screen shots of your phone's display over the Web).

One of my favorite discoveries is Nokia App Social, which gives you a way to post the Windows Phone apps you recommend. It's a valuable resource for tracking down hidden gems in Microsoft's store.

Finally, Nokia's App Folder adds functionality that should have come with Windows Phone in the first place: the ability to put a customized tile in the home screen that contains shortcuts to related apps.

That's the important stuff. The one glaring omission is a lack of support for Nokia's Glance app, which lets the phone display the time, even when it's turned off. Apparently, this feature is not yet compatible with the Icon, and it remains unclear if this will be remedied in the future.

Availability, Options, And Accessories

As of right now, Verizon is the only carrier offering the Lumia Icon. It can be purchased for $199.99 on a two-year contract, or for $549.99 outright. That puts it in line with other premium offerings, such as Verizon's HTC One Max and the iPhone 5s.

The phone is compatible with the following cellular bands: LTE: 700 MHz; SVLTE Band 13; Band 4; CDMA: 3G EVDO 850/1900 Rev A with Rx Diversity; Global Ready: GSM (850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz), UMTS (850, 900, 1900, and 2100 MHz).

Verizon ships the phone unlocked, so you could, in theory, buy it and use another company's nano-SIM card. I tested the Icon up in Canada, where it worked well on the Rogers network (albeit limited to 3G/HSPA+ networks, as the cellular modem is incompatible with this country's LTE frequencies). I'm hoping that the more recently-announced Lumia 930 will support more options than the Verizon-exclusive Icon.

In addition to its cellular connectivity, the Icon is equipped with Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi radios. We couldn't get Windows Phone 8 to recognize a Bluetooth-attached keyboard or mouse, since the operating system doesn't support the required HID profile. That's going to become more of a limitation as form factors continue growing. I'm much more pleased with the inclusion of wireless 802.11ac. Using the Icon on a comparably-equipped Wi-Fi network yields an impressive online experience.

Again, if you're interested in Verizon's Lumia Icon, you have a choice between a black or white phone. You get 32 GB of storage, standard, with about 23 GB accessible out of the box.

Other than a pre-installed Verizon nano-SIM card and non-removable 2420 mAh battery, the only included accessories are an AC-to-USB charger, USB-to-microUSB cable, and documentation. The lack of earphones is conspicuous, especially for a device aimed at the high-end of the smartphone spectrum.

The Icon also features Qi wireless charging support, though a charging pad must be purchased separately.

Camera Features And Example Photos

Nokia is synonymous with a superlative "cameraphone" experience, and the Lumia 1020's 40 MP sensor, xenon flash, and six-element lens represent a high water mark in the industry. The Lumia Icon/930 is actually a step back in that regard.

Even still, the Icon's 20 MP sensor, dual-LED flash, f/2.4 aperture, and Carl Zeiss optics with optical image stabilization are top-tier specifications, and they combine to yield impressive results.

Being a Lumia phone, the Icon comes with Nokia's excellent Camera app as the default for image capture. This software combines the functionality of Nokia Pro Cam and Nokia Smart Cam in one package, creating a more convenient experience. While automatic settings are what you start with, there are options to manually set white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed, and exposure through an intuitive radial menu interface.

The integrated Smart Cam functionality lets you record a sequence, rather than a single photo. This feature snaps 10 pictures in a row at a rate of four per second. But the magic happens after the fact when you're presented with the ability to remove objects, change faces, create a layered action shot, add blur to stationary parts of the scene, or simply select the best picture to save.

Given that the platform is processing all of this in real-time, the results can turn out to be quite impressive. But there's a tradeoff: image quality suffers, presumably as a result of a short exposure. You'll want to limit Smart Cam use to sunlit environments.

You also get the option to take 5 MP images, 5 MP JPG plus 16 MP (16:9)/20 MP (4:3) JPG image sets, or 5 MP JPG plus 16 MP (16:9)/20 MP (4:3) RAW (DNG) image sets.

The 5 MP images are the ones you have total access to from the camera; they're the ones you can post to social media and send to your friends. If you choose to store the larger versions as well, they're only used as reference in case you want to, say, un-zoom a zoomed in picture, or reframe. Full access to the 16/20 MP files is only granted when you hook up to your PC to download them.

Purists may lament the lack of absolute control over the larger images from the camera's interface. Realistically, though, even five megapixels is overkill for viewing on a 5" display or posting to Facebook. In fact, we've had issues attaching larger images to MMS messages on other phones, so Nokia's approach could be seen as a feature, even.

On the plus side, a large native resolution allows you to losslessly zoom in with a finger swipe on the display.

Where the Icon falters is its speed. Compared to other high-end phones, its camera takes longer to focus, and then to shoot as well. Snapping pictures in rapid succession isn't as bad; this is accomplished by holding down the camera button. Still, that first shot takes longer than I'd expect on a Snapdragon 800-powered platform. The process feels like an eternity compared to the iPhone's seemingly instantaneous response time in bright-light situations (although the iPhone is surprisingly slow to focus when the flash is enabled, according to Basemark OS II's camera test).

Of course, you can take a series of rapidly-captured shots using Nokia's Smart Sequence or a lens app like Microsoft's Blink. But you need time to set it up, and you have to be willing to tolerate the loss of quality. That's a painful limitation when you're scrambling to take a shot you don't control. In essence, the Lumia Icon's camera is at its best when you have the opportunity to think about and frame the scene. Then again, isn't that true for any camera? The ones able to also react quickly are what we consider special.

Let's take a look at the camera's output quality compared to HTC's new One (M8).

In our first low-light shot, the HTC One (M8) picks up more light, while the Lumia has an edge when it comes to detail.

Both cameras do a better job assisted by the flash. The Icon's detail remains crisper, though seemingly warmer as well. HTC's One tends more toward green.

In this shot, the One (M8) struggles with the mediocre light source, while Nokia's Lumia Icon produces a brighter picture with finer detail.

When it comes to colors, the Icon delivers more saturation than HTC's One, which appears muted.

Nokia's 20 MP sensor picks up a lot more detail in this overcast outdoor shot, which is especially obvious when you look at the building in the pop-up version. The Lumia's picture appears to have more saturation, too.

Both cameras suffer from quite a bit of noise at night. Again, the One (M8) produces a brighter image, but loses detail. Nokia's Lumia Icon doesn't incur the yellow tint.

Comparing the cameras on these smartphones, which employ completely different specifications, is interesting. While the HTC One (M8) has a relatively low-resolution 4 MP sensor, it's built for quick response times and light-gathering. That's a reasonable approach for a smartphone, which most folks whip out quickly in social situations.

The Lumia Icon and 930, on the other hand, use a high-resolution 20 MP sensor that doesn't have the same fast response time, but instead offers fine detail. If you value nuanced photography and the ability to reframe and zoom into high-resolution photos after you take them, Nokia's camera would be your weapon of choice.

Microphones And Video

While the Lumia Icon's camera isn't groundbreaking, Nokia appears to be pushing audio technology forward with a quartet of microphones. You'll find two unidirectional mics in front and a pair of multi-directional mics around back. This setup (shared with the Lumia 1520 phablet) allows the phone to capture directional sound and minimize background noise. And it actually works, as you'll see in the video embedded below (assuming you have stereo sound hardware to play it back on). We captured the same intersection at the same time using both HTC's One (M8) and Nokia's Icon/930:

The One (M8) does capture stereo audio. But it doesn't preserve surround information or cancel out background noise nearly as well as the Nokia. With the Icon, it's clear where the audio source comes from, and that it's moving toward. Nokia boasted excellent microphones on previous models, but this is an impressive advancement.

Video quality is good as well. The clip above should be indicative. After all, it was captured on the Nokia and duplicated for both phones. I simply swapped the audio to represent HTC's One.

As with snapping stills, though, the Icon takes a comparatively long time to focus. You're able to choose between 1080p or 720p at 24, 25, or 30 FPS, to select a preferred audio bass filter (off, 100, or 200 Hz), and toggle directional audio. During video capture, the LED, white balance, and focus can be controlled manually in real time.

Benchmark Suite, Methodology, And Test System Specs

Benchmark Suite

Comparing smartphone performance is a little more challenging than comparing PC components, since we have to find benchmarks that work across Windows Phone 8, Android, and iOS. Of the three, Windows Phone 8 has the lowest number of cross-platform testing apps, which makes sense when you consider its marketshare. Not only that, but particular phone models are sometimes incompatible with specific metrics, throwing yet another wrench in the pipe.

Further complicating today's performance analysis, we test all of our smartphones at a calibrated 200 nits of screen brightness to ensure comparable battery life and display measurements. Unfortunately, Windows Phone 8 does not have an adjustable screen brightness slider; it is limited to three factory preset settings: low, medium, and high. To provide comparable battery life and display measurements, we had to test at those three brightness levels and use them to extrapolate a 200 nit calibrated result. It's not ideal, but it's the best possible method we have at our disposal.

Test System Specs

Despite these challenges, Tom's Hardware is all about objective measurements and we've done our absolute best to provide the most cross-platform tests for as many platforms and SoCs as possible.

The iPhone 5s represents ARM v8, Meizu's MX3 represents the Exynos 5 Octa, Xiaomi's Mi3 represents the Nvidia Tegra 4, Google's Nexus 5 represents Snapdragon 800 performance on Android, and the HTC 8x represents the previous generation of Windows Phone 8 device performance with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus at 1.5 GHz.

Results: System And Graphics Tests

Basemark OS II

We begin our benchmarks with Basemark OS II, a suite of synthetic tests designed to stress the whole platform with a definite emphasis on processing.

The Icon generates a positive result, nearly tying Apple's iPhone 5s and taking a close second to Google's Nexus 5. Breaking down the individual tests, you can see that Nokia's latest achieves the highest memory score of the options we tested, but faltered in the Web test. This could be attributable to inefficiencies in Internet Explorer. The Nexus 5 wins the first place spot overall, likely because of its high graphics test result, which might come from a combination of running under Android and its faster Snapdragon 800 SoC.

Perhaps most surprising is how poorly the Tegra 4 chipset in Xiaomi's Mi3 performs, losing out to the previous-generation HTC 8x. Keep in mind that the 8x shares the same core hardware specifications as Nokia's Lumia 1020.

Basemark X 1.1

Based on the Unity 4.0 game engine, Rightware’s Basemark X is a cross-platform graphics benchmark for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8. This test utilizes Unity’s modern features via the OpenGL ES 2.0 render path. Features like high poly count models, shaders with normal maps, complex LoD algorithms, extensive per-pixel lighting (including directional and point light), along with a comprehensive set of post process, particle systems, and physics effects test how a modern game might look and run. 

Windows Phone 8 is limited to Basemark's medium detail setting, which developer Rightware designed specifically to accommodate Microsoft's mobile operating system. It is less demanding than the high detail setting, but remains visually impressive and is the highest common denominator across the three smartphone operating systems.

At the limited medium detail setting, the Lumia Icon surprisingly surpasses the competition. This reflects our experience with 3D games on Nokia's device; we are impressed with the smooth framerates, despite a high 1920x1080 native resolution.

Breaking the scores down, Basemark's on-screen results favor the Lumia Icon. Apple's iPhone 5s manages to surpass the Nexus 5 in the Dunes test, but keep in mind that the iPhone also has a much lower 1136x640 resolution than Google's 1920x1080 device.

In the off-screen test, the iPhone gives up much of the advantage it enjoyed in the Dune benchmark, and the Lumia Icon retains its advantage in Windows, despite the Nexus 5's higher CPU clock rate and identical resolution.

Results: Web And Battery Tests

Our Web tests are JavaScript- and HTML5-heavy selections from our Web Browser Grand Prix series. Such tests are extremely meaningful to mobile devices because so much of the in-app content is served via the platform's native browser. These tests not only offer a view of each device’s Web browsing performance, but since the tasks are typically CPU-dependent, browser benchmarks (especially JavaScript-heavy tests) are a great way to measure SoC performance between products using the same platform and browser.

In order to keep the browser version even across all Android devices, we're employing a static version of the Chromium-based Opera on that operating system. Due to platform restrictions, Safari is best choice for iOS-based devices, while Internet Explorer is the only game in town on Windows RT and Windows Phone 8.

Browsermark 2.0

Rightware’s Browsermark 2.0 is a synthetic browsing benchmark that tests several performance metrics, including load time, CSS, DOM, HTML5 Canvas, JavaScript, and WebGL.

The Lumia Icon fares poorly, as does the HTC 8x. It's no surprise that Windows Phone 8's Internet Explorer 10 browser is no speed demon, and we hope this weakness is addressed in the Windows Phone 8.1 update with Internet Explorer 11.

Peacekeeper 2.0

Peacekeeper is a synthetic Javascript performance benchmark from Futuremark.

The Icon and IE10 perform similarly in the Javascript test, behind the three-way second-place tie between the Nexus 5, Meizu MX3, and Xiaomi Mi3.

WebXPRT 2013

Principled Technologies' WebXPRT is an HTML5-based benchmark that simulates common productivity tasks traditionally handled by locally-installed applications, including: photo editing, financial charting, and offline note-taking.

Nokia's entry overtakes the Exynos 5 Octa-based Meizu MX3 and ties the Xiaomi Mi3 in WebXPRT 2013, performing quickly with the stocks dashboard and photo effects tests, but scoring less impressive face detection and offline notes results.

Basemark OS II: Battery

Basemark OS II comes with a demanding battery test that almost completely drains the phone from 100% power to calculate a final score that represents its power and longevity.

The Lumia Icon performs well in this discipline, taking third place behind the much smaller-screened iPhone 5s, and slightly ahead of our current favorite phone, Google's Nexus 5.

From a practical perspective, we are pleased with the Icon/930's battery life. Despite heavy use, its battery indicator remains high throughout the day. And although status bars are known liars, the only activity that seems to tax the device is heavy gaming.

Results: Brightness, Black Level, Contrast Ratio, And Gamma

Brightness

Brightness measurements are taken by recording the luminance output of each device displaying a full white pattern, with the brightness level set to both minimum and maximum values.

Nokia's Icon achieves the lowest maximum brightness result, though a peak of 300 nits was never an issue. The display is usable in all environments, even under direct sunlight.

In comparison, the Icon's minimum brightness score is actually pretty high. That's an artifact of Windows Phone 8's lack of a brightness slider. Instead, this is as low as we can get using the low setting.

Naturally, device comparisons are challenging with only three brightness options on the Icon. We typically dial devices into exactly 200 nits. But because the Nokia phone can't hit the number we need, we're testing at all three settings and extrapolating the results on a graph.

Black Level

Our black level measurement is the luminance output of a full black pattern after the full white has been standardized to 200 nits. It’s important to note that AMOLED displays always measure a black level of zero, since their pixels simply turn off to render black.

Boasting the only AMOLED display in our test group, the Icon is capable of a true zero black level. The iPhone distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with a low 0.25 nit result. And the rest of the competition hovers around 0.35 nits.

Contrast Ratio

Contrast ratio is the difference between a full white pattern and a full black pattern. Due to their zero reading on black level tests, AMOLED displays are said to have an infinite contrast ratio.

The AMOLED screen wins again, as the Icon and its infinite contrast level trumps the IPS-equipped competition. Once again, the iPhone 5s' display leads the rest of the pack with an 800:1 measurement.

Gamma

Gamma compensates for the linear brightness levels displayed by a monitor, versus the nonlinear way our eyes perceive light. A gamma curve of 2.2 is what we want to see. Let's see how these devices compare:

The iPhone rules this test. While the Lumia Icon's AMOLED display is technically capable of a wider color gamut than IPS displays, these are often improperly calibrated by the operating system, resulting in disappointing results. More surprising is how poorly the Nexus 5 compares to the other IPS-equipped devices.

Color Temperature

Color temperature is a measurement in Kelvin that is used to describe how “warm” or “cool” a given display is. Ideally, as long as you're not viewing your device in direct sunlight, this should be in the 6500 range. Higher color temperatures result in a cool, bluish hue, while lower temperatures deliver a warm or reddish tone.

The Lumia Icon delivers a very cool 8300-degree color temperature. Although this result is probably higher than it should be, that's also Nokia's default setting. You do get color temperature and saturation controls, unlike most of the Icon's competition.

Color Gamut Volume

Our volume measurements are compared against both the sRGB and AdobeRGB color gamuts. A reading of 100% on sRGB and 72% on AdobeRGB is optimal for viewing the vast majority of digital content. Lower results are typically accompanied by an overly red or yellow image. Meanwhile, a higher reading is usually too blue/green.

The Icon suffers from its AMOLED display. Despite having a larger gamut of colors to choose from, we can see it's not calibrated properly. The rest of the pack displays a much more desirable result closer to the 100/72 standard.

Will The Icon Convert You From Android Or iOS?

Once in a while, a smartphone comes along that is so impressive, so technologically advanced, and so sublime, that it can draw you away from your previous operating environment of choice. Nokia's Lumia Icon/930 is not going to be the phone that gets you to switch from Android or iOS, though.

Don't get me wrong. It's great to look at, plenty fast by virtue of its hardware platform, and a pleasure to use in the real world. Even Android and iOS loyalists have to admit this package is tightly-built. If Windows Phone 8 already is your favorite, you can't do better than the Icon, which gets Microsoft on equal footing, hardware-wise, with some of the most advanced devices introduced thus far in 2014. Whether you're talking about its 5" 1080p AMOLED display, quad-core Snapdragon 800 SoC, Adreno 330 graphics engine, or 20 MP camera, the Lumia Icon is a strong, well-rounded showing.

For a device to be truly...iconic, though, it needs to best the competition in a number of meaningful ways. As we look for fields where the newest Lumia excels, it only stands above the crowd with the ability to capture directional surround audio. That's a cool advantage, to be sure. But it's not a must-have feature. There might be a handful of folks willing to try Windows Phone 8 for the Icon's quad-microphone array, but Nokia isn't going to convert technophiles en masse like this.

It's certainly possible that the Lumia 1020 won over photography enthusiasts to Windows Phone. But those same folks won't find themselves now compelled to try the Icon. The 1020's camera is superior to the Icon/930 in every way, even though Nokia's new flagship is otherwise technically superior to its Snapdragon S4-powered predecessor.

No, the Lumia Icon and Lumia 930 are for folks who already own a Lumia 900/600/500-series phone, an HTC 8x, a Samsung ATIV, or perhaps a Windows Phone 7 device. It's for brand loyalists who already appreciate Microsoft's niche mobile operating system and want to step up to more cutting-edge hardware. For these users, Nokia's new Lumia represents a big jump forward in screen size, performance, and capability. It's a Windows Phone that you can be proud to pull out of your pocket; it's not one that you have to make excuses for as your more smug acquaintances flash their iPhones and Galaxies.