BlackBerry

DTEK50 unveiled by BlackBerry: Mid-Tier Secure Android Smartphone for £275

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DTEK50 delivers BlackBerry’s unmatched security, privacy and productivity to price-conscious consumers and businesses

BlackBerry announced today that DTEK50, the world’s most secure Android smartphone, is now available for pre-orders at ShopBlackBerry.com. DTEK50 is BlackBerry’s second smartphone powered by Android, following the PRIV.

Fully equipped with Android Marshmallow 6.0, DTEK50 combines BlackBerry’s unique security, privacy and productivity with the full Android experience in an all-touch design, at a price point that’s accessible for consumers and ideal for enterprise fleet deployment.

“We take our customers privacy seriously. That’s why we’re proud to have all the security and privacy functionality that’s built in our newest Android smartphone. DTEK50 merges the unique security and connectivity features BlackBerry is known for with the rich Android ecosystem, said Ralph Pini, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager, Devices, BlackBerry.

“DTEK50 adds to BlackBerry’s lineup of secure smartphones, providing choices to our customers with different price points on both BlackBerry 10 and Android platforms.”

[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”84387″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]Android Security at the Forefront

In a recent survey of Android smartphone users, BlackBerry found that 50 percent believe their smartphone is only somewhat secure, and what’s more, despite data security fears, one in six Android users don’t know about Android security patches.

“With an increase in cybercrime on smartphones, people need to recognize that the private details of their lives, where they live, their bank info, pictures of their kids, are at risk on their personal device. You wouldn’t leave the doors of your house unlocked at night. Having a smartphone that doesn’t take your privacy seriously is the equivalent,” said David Kleidermacher, Chief Security Officer, BlackBerry.

“It’s equally important for businesses to protect their sensitive data from cyberattacks at all points of their mobile environment, from the device to the network and servers.”

DTEK50 was designed to address the security and privacy needs of today’s uncompromising Android users. Smartphones are increasingly being targeted for cyberattacks through tactics like malicious apps, scareware notifications and insecure Wi-Fi connections. BlackBerry’s Android smartphones, including DTEK50 and PRIV, have unique built-in hardware security.

DTEK50 encrypts all users information, including business critical data and personal data such as pictures, videos and contacts. Malware protection is also built-in along with back-up, wipe and restore capabilities. Additional software provides users with visibility and control over which apps get access to personal info or device features such as the microphone or camera. BlackBerry also delivers security patches on the same day that Google publicly releases information about them, while many popular Android smartphones put the users private information at risk of being hacked due to slow security updates.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_gallery interval=”3″ images=”84367,84368,84369,84370,84371,84372,84373,84374,84375,84376,84377″ img_size=”full” onclick=””][vc_column_text]Features that make DTEK50 the most secure Android smartphone, include:

  • Rapid Security Patching: BlackBerry has a record of being the quickest to deliver security patches, setting the bar in incident response and patch management to protect your device from malicious threats.
  • DTEK by BlackBerry App: Enables users to automatically monitor their OS and apps to know when their privacy could be at risk and to take action to improve it. The DTEK app also tracks applications and notifies you when someone is: taking pictures or videos without your knowledge, turning your microphone on, sending a text message, or accessing your contacts or location.
  • Hardware Root of Trust: BlackBerry’s manufacturing process uses a proprietary technique that adds security from the start, allowing for the tracking, verification and provisioning of DTEK50.
  • Secure Boot Process: Starting with the root of trust, each stage of DTEK50’s secure boot chain must first verify that the next component is fully intact before proceeding, ensuring your device has not been tampered with since the last restart.
  • Android OS hardening: BlackBerry provides additional security patches, improved random number, address space generation and certificate pinning to make it more difficult for attackers to target a device by scrambling application/system memory.
  • FIPS 140-2 Compliant Full Disk Encryption: Protects your private information, like pictures or bank information, from being stolen if you were to lose your phone.

Ready to Work
DTEK50 combines the world’s most secure smartphone with BlackBerry’s enterprise management solutions to produce a powerful device capable of powering any work day. Key features include:

  • Android for Work and Google Play for Work: Allows for fast, simple and secure integration with an enterprise environment as well as easy access to numerous rich business and IT-managed apps.
  • Full Enterprise Mobility Management Support: DTEK50 supports BlackBerry’s powerful suite of EMM applications and secure productivity solutions, including: WatchDox by BlackBerry for secure file-sharing, Good Work for business-class email and collaboration tools, Strong Authentication by BlackBerry as a VPN solution, SecuSUITE for Enterprise for secure voice and instant messaging communication, BBM Protected for encrypted messaging and BES12 for secure cross-platform management.

Design Meets Function
DTEK50, BlackBerry’s thinnest device ever, represents the best of BlackBerry with Android to make users more productive and responsive, pairing security with intelligent design. Key features include:

  • BlackBerry Intelligent Keyboard: DTEK50 has a smart keyboard designed to learn from users and increase typing accuracy and speed. It provides word suggestions as you type and includes up to three languages, letting you flick them into place for faster conversations.
  • BlackBerry Hub: This unified inbox is an irreplaceable tool for consolidating all of your messages in one place, whether it’s email, calendar, social or phone calls.
  • Customizable BlackBerry Convenience Key: With the press of a button, the Convenience Key provides quick access to your most used applications and more.
  • Stunning Screen: DTEK50 has a 5.2″ full HD display, capable of displaying 16 million colors. The screen is made of scratch-resistant glass and features a specialized oleophobic coating to protect against smudges and fingerprints.
  • Expandable Memory: With support for micro SD cards up to two TB, DTEK50 provides the flexibility to add affordable and hot-swappable memory to download, install, capture and share as your needs evolve.
  • Dazzling Camera: DTEK50 is engineered to deliver professional-looking photos with an 8MP front facing camera and a 13MP auto-focus rear camera. Plus, features like Phase Detection Auto Focus and a dual-tone LED flash are designed to help the camera focus instantly and accurately for a blur-free, realistic looking photos, even in low light.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”84383″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]Security can seem complicated, but DTEK50 makes it simple for you. DTEK by BlackBerry for Android will automatically monitor your OS and apps and let you know when your privacy could be at risk and how you can take action to improve it. With just a quick glimpse you can see the overall security rating for your device – excellent, fair or poor – and what you can do to improve it. DTEK also tracks your applications and notifies you when someone is:

  • Taking pictures or videos without your knowledge
  • Turning your microphone on
  • Sending a text message
  • Accessing your contacts or location

BlackBerry Takes Your Security Seriously

BlackBerry lives and breathes security and has taken extra steps to help protect you from malware, data breaches and any attempts to hack and tamper with your OS. DTEK50 is packed with lots of other security features:

  • Encryption protects your pictures or bank info from being stolen if you lose your phone
  • Password Keeper to securely store all your passwords, log in information and important records

Take control and be confident knowing your personal data is being kept private.

Ready for Enterprise Adoption

DTEK50comes ready to work. Android for Work support allows for fast, simple and secure integration with your enterprise environment. Google Play for Work enables easy access to IT managed apps. BlackBerry offers a one-stop shop for the most comprehensive mobility package, the world’s most secure smartphones and BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions. It’s a powerful combination that will enable your business and employees to achieve amazing results.

BlackBerry Productivity & Security Plug-ins

Open the door to a suite of powerful BlackBerry applications that further enhance productivity and security.

  • WatchDox by BlackBerry: A secure, intuitive file-sharing solution with granular document and permission control.
  • Good Work: business-class email and collaboration tools to enhance productivity, full integration with Microsoft Office, and easy access to managed work apps.
  • Strong Authentication by BlackBerry: A VPN solution that uses DTEK50 as a secondary factor for authentication rather than requiring physical tokens, shared secrets, or passcodes.
  • SecuSUITE for Enterprise: A background anti-eavesdropping solution that provides a high level of security for voice and instant messaging communications.
  • BBM Protected: A hardened version of BBM that strengthens encryption on messages, allowing the app to be used for collaboration in regulated industries.
  • BlackBerry Enterprise Identity: a single sign-on (SSO) identity that enables easy access to all cloud services from any device – inside or outside of the office.
  • BES12: your mobile traffic travels over the secure BlackBerry network to ensure data security, across iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry devices, protecting your most important asset, our business data.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Availability and Pricing

Starting today, DTEK50 is available to pre-order from ShopBlackBerry.com in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands for £275 / $299 USD.

DTEK50 will be available in a number of channels around the world, including more than 40 partners from electronics stores, carriers, VARs and distributors. This includes Rogers, Bell, TELUS, WIND, Videotron and SaskTel among others in Canada.

In the U.S., DTEK50 will initially be available in Best Buy, B&H and Amazon. Availability of DTEK50 in additional global channels and countries will be announced in the coming weeks.

For a limited time, customers who pre-order a DTEK50 on ShopBlackBerry.com only will receive a complimentary BlackBerry Mobile Power Pack, a high-capacity portable charger worth $59.99 USD ($69.99 CDN, and £54.99) that powers all your compatible mobile devices to maximize your productivity and play time. This offer expires on August 8th at 11:59 pm PST.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”84386″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center” onclick=”zoom”][vc_column_text]

DTEK50 Specifications

Design

Size
Height 147 mm / 5.79 in
Width 72.5 mm / 2.85 in
Depth 7.4 mm / 0.29 in

Weight
135g / 4.76 oz

Navigation
All-touch screen, with intuitive gesture based navigation
Keyboard
On screen BlackBerry Keyboard
Contextual auto-correction, next-word prediction and a personalised learning engine that gets to know the way you type with on screen flick typing or seamless flow typing.
Dedicated keys
Volume Up/Down, Lock (for Power On/Off)
Customisable BlackBerry Convenience Key (usable as Mute Key when on an active call)

Display

Resolution
424 PPI
1920 x 1080 resolution
24-bit colour depth
Screen Size
5.2” diagonal
16:9 aspect ratio

OS

Operating System
Android OS

Performance

Processor
Qualcomm 8952 with 64 bit Quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 and Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 (Snapdragon 617 Octa-Core, 64 bit)
Adreno 405, 550MHz GPU

Memory
3 GB RAM
16 GB Flash

Expandable memory
Expandable memory via hot swappable microSD memory card (Up to 2TB)

Ports
USB 2.0 fully supported with standard microUSB 2.0 cable (included in box)

Power

Battery
2610 mAh 4.4V non-removable Lithium Ion battery QC2.0 Enabled – 50% charge in 51 minutes

Battery life
Up to 17 hours mixed battery life
Up to 17 hours talk time
Up to 24 days standby time
Up to 40 hours audio playback
Up to 8 hours video playback

Camera & Video

Rear Camera
13 megapixel auto-focus camera
Phase Detect Auto Focus (PDAF), Fast focus lock
HDR
6-element f2.0 lens
Dual Tone LED Flash Enhanced photo colour balance
4x digital zoom
Continuous & touch to focus, face detection, image stabilisation
Panorama, Burst, Live Filters
Multi-frame Low Light Enhancement
1080p HD video recording at 30 fps

Front Camera
8MP Fixed-Focus, f2.2
1.125um pixel size
84Ëš wide angle/field of view lens
Image & video stabilisation
1080p HD video recording at 30 fps
Selfie Flash
Wide Selfie Mode (also known as Selfie Panorama)
Multi-Frame Low Light Enhancement

Multimedia

Image formats
BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WEBP
Audio & video formats
3GP, 3G2, AAC, AVI, ADTS, ASF, AWB, DIVX, FLAC, IMY, MID, MKV, MOV, MP3, MPEG-4, MXMF, OGG, OTA, RTTTL, RTX, WAV, WEBM, WMV, XMF
Audio & video
encoding/decoding
MPEG-4, AAC+, AAC-LC, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, DivX, EVRC, FLAC, H.263, H.264, H265/HEVC, MIDI, MP3, OPUS, PCM, QCELP, VC-1, VORBIS, VP8, VP9, WMA, WMA 9/10, WMA Pro, Xvid, eAAC+

Streaming protocols
HTTP(S) Progressive Download, HTTP(S) Live Streaming (HLS) version 3, RTSP (RTP, SDP)

Apps

Pre-loaded apps
BlackBerry Applications:
BlackBerry Keyboard, BlackBerry Hub, BlackBerry Calendar, Contacts by BlackBerry, Notes by BlackBerry, Tasks by BlackBerry, BlackBerry Camera, BBM, DTEK by BlackBerry, BlackBerry Device Search, BlackBerry Launcher, BlackBerry Services, BlackBerry Help, BlackBerry Password Keeper, Microsoft exFAT Technology for BlackBerry, BlackBerry Content Transfer, Yahoo! Finance

Android Applications:

Gmail, Hangouts, Google Chrome, Google Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Play, Google Photos, Messenger (SMS), Android Device Manager

Alerts & Notifications

Tone
Vibrate
On-screen or white LED indicator
(Some notification options are user configurable)

Networks & Connectivity

Network bands2
North America and Latin America:
FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 20, 29, 30(2100/1900/1800/1700/850/2600/700/700/800/700/2300 MHz)
HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 (2100/1900/1700/850/900 MHz)
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)

Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific:
FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 20, 28A (2100/1900/1800/2600/900/800/700 MHz)
TD-LTE 38, 40, 41 (2600/2300/2500 MHz)
HSPA+ 1, 2, 5/6, 8 (2100/1900/850/900 MHz)
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)

Wi-Fi®
802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz
802.11 a/n 5GHz
802.11 ac 5GHz
4G Mobile Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct

FM Radio

Bluetooth
Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy (LE) and EDR

GPS
Assisted, Autonomous and Simultaneous GPS
Support for User Plane and Control Plane GPS
GLONASS, BeiDou
OTDOA

Pre-loaded Google Maps

NFC
NFC technology is used to create a connection to share information between your BlackBerry device and other NFC-enabled devices or NFC tags. Features on DTEK50 that use NFC technology include Android Beam, Tap and Pay, and Tap and Go.

Sensors

Accelerometer
Magnetometer
Gyroscope
Proximity
Ambient light
Hall Effect

Accessibility

Google TalkBack screen reader for audible output
Face-to-face video chat with Google Hangouts
Google Now voice assistance to answer questions and perform actions
Scalable fonts and magnification to zoom in or zoom out
Closed Captioning support
High contrast text, colour inversion and colour correction
Certain models rated for use with hearing aids
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]BlackBerry have made it quite clear that this is a mid-tier device and the price of £275 reflects that. When asked if the DTEK50 was simply a re-branded Alcatel Idol 4, they company stated that they used a partner device “as a starting reference”.

Officially the colour is called Shadow Grey and comes with Marshmallow 6.01 but BlackBerry state that the device will eventually receive Android Nougat. What is unusual is the lack of any logo on the front of the device, simply a logo on the back. You can make any inference from that you wish.

The BlackBerry Hub finally has pinch filter (from BB10) and this will also be available to Priv owners from Google Play next week, as will the updated virtual keyboard that is installed on the DTEK50.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]