Let’s be real, though. If you’re eyeing this phone, you’re after its secret weapon, a four-row physical keyboard that slides out firmly from under the screen, trundle-bed style.
Typing on real keys with a phablet-sized 5.4-inch screen towering over them is odd at first, but once I found my acrobatic balance, my fingers were scurrying around at up to 60 words per minute. That’s about 20% faster than I type on my iPhone (though still 15% slower than on the BlackBerry Classic’s larger, wider, backlit keyboard).
I’m very jealous. A lot of Apple bloggers have jumped on to remark that we’ve moved past hardware keyboards but it’s easy to say that when you only use Apple devices in which a majority of the company’s revenues are from devices with software keyboards. I miss hardware keyboards. I rarely type on my iPhone or iPad and when I do, it’s about 90 seconds to type out a single sentence because every word is incorrect or correct and AutoCorrect changes it to something else entirely. I use real keyboards to get work done.
If the Priv ran iOS, you can bet I’d be lining up to buy one. It’s a shame that you either choose a company that respects your privacy or you choose the other guy (Google). The fact that the only remaining Google services I use are Voice & YouTube, I could never use a Google Android phone and not feel guilty about it and unfortunately, it seems the Blackberry Priv is the only device with a modern processor and hardware keyboard.
If Blackberry wants to send me one to review, I’d use it exclusively for a month without the Google services enabled. I love Apple but lacking a hardware keyboard is something I really miss every time I try to type out a sentence on my phone.