Android Powered Blackberry Priv to be Launched by this Year End [Reports]

Once upon a time, the Blackberry was considered to be a major player in the mobile phone market among Apple, Samsung and others. But now, the company's market share declined, at least in terms of smartphone to 3%.

Keeping things in mind, one would say that the Blackberry's failure lies completely in the lack of innovation, as it didn't react to the changing scenario fast enough. As per the Fortune report, Blackberry was ranked the fastest growing company in the world four years ago, by selling around 13.2 million of its devices in the first quarter.

In contrary, the company has struggled to achieve the figures of 1.1 million this year. In between all these chaos, one cannot forget the success of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), the company's proprietary messaging platform.

Shedding its exclusive tag, the company has started expanding the BBM app to all the platform including Android, iOS and Windows Phone with 140 million subscribers from 20 million in just 1-year gap.

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In order to capture the smartphone market share, the company has opted to run its upcoming smartphone, dubbed as Priv with a third party platform, specifically with an Android software hoping for a hit.

Recently, the Blackberry CEO John Chen confirmed the launch of first Android-powered smartphone codenamed Priv at the end of this year in major markets in-store and online, along with the FY Q2 2016 earnings.

Further, John Chen also mentioned that the company on the other side is committed to BB10 and will be rolling out the BlackBerry 10.3.3 update first quarter, next year.

As per earlier rumors, the Blackberry Priv is likely to come with 5.4-inch Quad HD display, Hexa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 Soc, 3GB RAM, 32GB of built-in memory, with expandable option, 18MP rear camera with dual LED Flash, 5MP front snapper and 4G LTE connectivity.

Regarding the upcoming BlackBerry Priv, John Chen, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BlackBerry, said, "At the same time, we are focused on making faster progress to achieve profitability in our handset business. 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."