Despite some interesting tablet hardware in the earlier days of Android, French manufacturer Archos hasn't had anything notable to show for several years. Perhaps that's why the company is jumping into the small but growing niche of ultra-secure cell phones, like the Blackphone and the Turing Phone. Archos has partnered with SIKUR (read: Secure), a vendor of encrypted company-focused communications apps, to create the GranitePhone. It's available to purchase today for a whopping $850.

Thanks to the GranitePhone's Android-derived "Granite OS," basically everything on the device is encrypted, even the custom homescreen that eschews a conventional grid layout for a modified version of the SIKUR inbox. But for all the security selling points, the promotional material for the phone has a surprising lack of detail. The official website mentions "various authentication layers," "no backdoors," and "developed for unique people" (what?), and says that the phone's storage is securely backed up in the cloud and can be accessed from other SIKUR apps.

If the marketing doesn't sell you, then the specifications certainly won't. The GranitePhone uses a Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch, 1080p screen, just 16GB of storage, 16MP rear and 8MP front cameras, and a somewhat anemic 2700mAh battery. That's some decidedly mid-range hardware - a similarly-equipped Android phone usually costs less than half of that. The styling is typical of Archos, which is to say grey plastic and lots of it. There's no mention of which open-source version of Android was used to create the operating system (or of support for Google apps). If you think that's worth $850, then 1) why? and 2) you can pay for it directly on the GranitePhone site.