Blackphone: A privacy focused phone available for pre-order at $629

Black­phone, The joint ven­ture of Silent Circle and Geek­s­phone, is announced at MWC 2014, It’s main focus is on pri­vacy dir­ectly con­trolled by end user. Black­phone offers a full suite of applic­a­tions giv­ing world­wide users unpre­ced­en­ted con­trol over pri­vacy and security.

Black­phone provides encryp­tion for phone calls, emails, texts and inter­net brows­ing. It will provide inter­net access through VPN. The phone runs on a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Android called PrivatOS. 

Hard­ware part, The black­phone sports a 4.7‑inch HD IPS screen powered by 2 GHz quad-core SoC with 2GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB of intern­al stor­age, 8MP primary cam­era with flash and 1.3MP front cam­era, sup­ports LTE, HSPA+, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11n Wi-Fi, GPS and more.

Black­phone comes unlocked and fea­tures sev­er­al pre-installed pri­vacy tools, all of which are fully enabled for at least two years of usage. The pri­vacy tools include the Silent Circle suite of apps, includ­ing Silent Phone, Silent Text, and Silent Con­tacts; anonym­ous search, private brows­ing, and VPN from Dis­con­nect; and secure cloud file stor­age from Spi­derOak. In addi­tion, phone ships with the Smart WiFi Man­ager from Mike Ker­shaw, Chief Archi­tect for SGP Tech­no­lo­gies, and a power­ful remote-wipe and device recov­ery tool.

Priva­tOS offers fre­quent Secure Over-The-Air (SOTA) updates dir­ectly from SGP Tech­no­lo­gies, rather than rely­ing on car­ri­ers to approve and release updates. Black­phone will also ship with the Black­phone Activ­a­tion Wiz­ard and the Black­phone Secur­ity Center.

Black­phone is now avail­able for pre-order to indi­vidu­als and enter­prises as an unlocked device with a start­ing price of US$629.

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