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19 March 2024

BlackBerry advances Priv roll-out in Dubai

Published
By Joseph George

BlackBerry Priv has started selling at the Dubai Mall outlet. BlackBerry was originally scheduled to roll out the device in the UAE stores from January. The device went on pre-order from December 21.

However, the BlackBerry store at Dubai says it has already started selling the device a week in advance. “We started selling it from December 26. We received stocks a bit early and so decided to place them on stands,” said a staff at the BlackBerry store in Dubai.

The company is hoping to make some major inroads into the smartphone market promising one of the most secure android devices currently in the market.

According to BlackBerry most smartphone users, especially those using Android devices are living in the era of anti-privacy. Quoting a Cambridge University study it says nearly 90 per cent of Android devices are exposed to critical vulnerabilities due to slow patching while 60 per cent of Android devices are currently vulnerable to a WebView security risk. What’s more nearly 30 per cent of mobile apps steal and sell your contacts, messages, photos, or browsing history to parties ranging from aggressive advertisers to cybercriminals.

“PRIV combines the superior privacy and security you’ve come to expect from BlackBerry with the flexibility of Android’s ecosystem and apps. It protects your mobile experience from the device level up to the application level, and offers a powerful suite of tools through which you can take charge of your private data. The end result is a device that you can trust will offer you better protection from threats against your apps, networks, and – most importantly – personal information,” the smartphone maker said providing details about the security set up in its latest Android device.

But will Blackberry be able to convince Android users to shift merely on the basis of better security. The device that was launched in the international market in November and in the UAE now is priced at Dh2899. Reports already indicate that the company could drop the price during the first quarter of 2016 in the follow up to the Mobile World Congress.

According to the IDC the worldwide mobile phone market is said to reach a total of 1,960 million unit shipments in 2015, down 0.1 per cent from the 1,961.9 million units shipped in 2014. Total mobile phone shipments will reach 2,122.4 million units worldwide, resulting in a CAGR of 1.6 per cent from 2014 to 2019.

"Although shipments remained nearly flat in 2015, we still expect that the worldwide mobile phone market will steadily grow heading into 2019," says Anthony Scarsella, research manager for IDC's Mobile Phones team.