BlackBerry DTEK60: An elegant flagship for grown-ups Available for order this week, BlackBerry’s penultimate own-brand phone is a luxurious but light big sibling to its DTEK50. That was the first to marry a reference design, from TCL, to BlackBerry’s own “hardened” Android. The DTEK60 – not a name that rolls off the tongue – also uses BlackBerry’s Android, but aims for the …
>What is the phone call quality, good, bad, or indifferent? That is the one thing that always gets forgotten in reviews of phones
The article said this would be addressed in the full review. This article was marked as a 'hands on review', which by tech blog convention means a quick first look and feel.
However, one would expect the call quality to be on par with every other Snapdragon 8xx-based phone out there - i.e it works.
And if you follow the people who trade in the missing key BB's, you'll see them get into a car with dings on the bumpers and quarter panels, who then drive home where fence palings are falling off etc.
And you can bet within 3 months, their new iThing has a cracked screen.
Never had a BlackBerry keyboard fail on me. But then again, I treat an expensive electronic device with the respect it deserves.
"Question. Is that hardware keyboard really, REALLY necessary?"
Well there is a simple test to check if you need a hardware keyboard or not. Look into the distance and focus on an object there. Now take your hand and put it in front of both of your eyes. If you can still see that object, that means you have transparent fingers and a touchscreen keyboard will be right for you.
However if you don't have transparent fingers that means that you'll have to type blindly which means that you need some feedback on how far you were off the centre of the key.
Now you might say that you don't actually type text on your mobile device, or that you can use autocorrect. That's all fine and good unless you actually want to store data on that device securely. To store data on the device you must encrypt it. For such an encryption you need to have some sort of a secret. If you store that secret inside the device it's next to your data so an attacker can get to it relatively easily (may cost a few thousand Euros and involve uncapping chips, but that has been done in the past). So you need to have an external secret. Legally (in many countries) it must not be stored inside of something you "have", but instead something you "know". So you use a passphrase. However typing in such a passphrase quickly requires you to be able to type quickly and precisely. Having autocorrect on your password prompt would be a _huge_ security problem, as autocorrect would remember all those purposefully misspelled words in your passphrase.
Again if you have transparent fingers, you're probably fine with a screen keyboard.
For me, yes.
I'm quite happy typing on my Q5, though I now no longer keep a sim in it, it is now mostly just a media player now (remarkably good sound via bluetooth).
I have replaced it with a 10 inch tablet which is about what I need for a touchscreen to be useful. The tablet is a Yuntab, dual sim and cost £60, and the first Chinese budget phone that I purchased as a stop gap, that I has been good enough to keep using.
I don't find Android a good enough quality system to justify an expensive phone to run it.
I don't see myself buying another (pocket sized) smartphone.
Or £100 less and go with a phone that will rarely or never receive updates.
How are S7 owners finding updates (early days, I realise)? My experience with an S3 was that they were always several months late (because there was a lot of own-brand Samsung software at the front end - some of which was very useful, but none of which was very reliable) and petered out altogether after about 18 months.
Samsung is still a bit slow at pushing out updates but has improved a lot on the S3 days. especially when it comes to the security stuff. But you'll often be holding a network's Samsung which has even more crap installed on it and an even slower update approval process. Fortunately, nearly all of the Samsung devices are supported by CyanogenMod.
I find I type more accurately and faster with the Priv keyboard than any of the touchscreen only keyboards I've used on various phones over the years
I also don't lost the bottom part of the screen in slack/whatsapp/skype/email/txt messaging apps and the swipe up word completion on the Priv keyboard works really well.
Can you root it so you can limit the IP-Addresses it will talk to? (would be a _big_ security improvement)
Can you strip down the operating system to just the things you need? (would be a _big_ security improvement)
So essentially, from the security standpoint this is not better than your average Chinese Android device for 50 Euros.
Practically none of the reviews point out that whilst the DTEK app will notify the user that a permission is being used *it will not block it*. Useful as a chocolate teapot.
If Blackberry had added this capability/merged in a more friendly version of XPosed or similar I'd be impressed.
As it is, they're mildly lauded for meeting the minimum standard of issuing timely security patches. THIS IS NOT A FEATURE. The other manufactures should be given a negative rating until they actually support their products.
It's fine, though, no-one cares - chucking your phone into landfill after two years because it can't be updated and is insecure as hell is standard.
As I recall, notifications can be disabled on a per-app basis on baseline Marshmallow. I know my S5, Note 4, and Iconia One 10 (all Marshmallow, the One has stock MM so it's not a TouchWiz thing, either) allow me to disable or prioritize most notifications on a per-app basis, and not just on/off, either.
PS. As for chucking the phone in two years, this may well become standard practice as hackers find hardware exploits like Rowhammer that no software can totally defend.
Yes, they can - if it's a Marshmallow app, but it's only a basic 'disable' not spoofing of information that's more useful. Normally it's a case that if the app is denied permissions it just falls over.
Apps earlier than Marshmallow bypass the controls.
After worrying about it for a bit, I'm calling rowhammer overblown. No one is jumping up and down about it, and the people bothered to replicate the issues are finding it difficult to find vulnerable ram.
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