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That's the most common reaction I get when I show people the "Priv," BlackBerry's first Android phone. It's hard to believe the original iPhone came out more than eight years ago, but only now would we say BlackBerry has something that might compete in the modern smartphone era.

BlackBerry limped along for years with the old-school BlackBerry OS, and the company didn't come out with a revamped smartphone platform until the 2013 release of BlackBerry 10. By then BlackBerry had already lost the ecosystem war, though, and a new platform from a single manufacturer had no chance of gaining a foothold in the app market. Strategy Analytics recently ranked BB10 fifth in worldwide market share behind Android, iOS, Windows, and even Samsung's Tizen—ouch. It's no wonder people are surprised to hear that BlackBerry still exists.

With the Priv, the company finally joins the mobile operating system duopoly by jumping into bed with the only major app ecosystem available to third parties: Android. The Priv runs an old version of Android: 5.1.1 Lollipop, the first of many disappointments the Priv will throw our way. Being a BlackBerry, the Priv of course has a hardware keyboard, but the keyboard isn't any good. It's so flat and tiny that it's awful to type on; we greatly preferred the packed-in software keyboard. Still, the biggest disappointment is the price: a whopping $700. It's not an unheard of sum for a mobile phone, but build quality issues and a long list of compromises just aren't worth $700.

BlackBerry's lack of value makes a lot of sense in the context of the company. Just as it struggled to compete with the smartphone app revolution of the past eight years, it's now struggling to compete with the high-quality, low-cost Android devices out there. The Priv is priced like an Android flagship from several years ago, and it probably could have competed in the era of janky, plastic flagships like the Galaxy S4 or 5. Today, though, $700 for this level of quality just doesn't cut it. Even with a "modern" OS, BlackBerry still feels like it's a few years behind the competition.

Design and Build Quality

SPECS AT A GLANCE: BlackBerry Priv SCREEN 2560×1440 5.43" (540ppi) curved AMOLED OS Android 5.1.1 Lollipop CPU Six-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 (two 1.8 GHz Cortex-A57 cores and four 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 cores) RAM 3GB GPU Adreno 418 STORAGE 32GB plus MicroSD slot NETWORKING Dual Band 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, NFC BANDS FD-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 20, 29,30

HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5/6, 8Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE PORTS MicroUSB 2.0, 3.5mm headphone jack CAMERA 18MP rear camera with OIS, 2MP front camera SIZE 147.0 (184 opened) x 77.2 x 9.4 mm WEIGHT 192 g BATTERY 3410 mAh STARTING PRICE $699 OTHER PERKS Sliding hardware keyboard, hardware convenience key, RGB notification LED, Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, Qi and PMA wireless charging, SlimPort

The Priv might not run Marshmallow, but it sure feels like it's made out of one. Our primary complaint is the rubbery plastic back. BlackBerry isn't using a solid, hard plastic here; it's more like a skin that was stretched across a supporting inner shell. It's squishy and deforms when you press on it, which you can see in the above picture. This wouldn't be a huge deal for a bargain device, but it's unacceptable for a $700 phone. The rubber skin is at least very grippy, with a carbon fiber-like weave pattern in it. It looks nice enough.

The display curves down on the left and right side like a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Similar to that phone, the curve is a rather useless gimmick, and it seems out of place on a business phone like the Priv. The display is a plastic AMOLED display, reminding us a lot of what we've seen from the LG G Flex. For some colors, the display puts out an uneven color and ends up looking dirty or grainy. It's not as bad as the G Flex, but it's still noticeable.

While the display bend isn't as extreme as the S6 Edge, it does still distort the side of apps. BlackBerry doesn't try to make use of the curved display much—there's a menu of app shortcuts you can pull out from the side of the display, and the curve shows charging information while the screen is "off."

The buttons are plastic with a shiny faux-chrome finish, and the real surprise is that there are four buttons: Power, volume up, volume down, and a button BlackBerry calls "mute." Pressing the mute switch when the phone is actively making noise will mute the device, but that is the only scenario when the button will do something. A "preemptive" mute with the mute button isn't possible. Common sense would dictate that pressing the mute button at any point would set the phone volume to silent, but in reality, the mute button won't do anything unless noise is actually coming out of the phone. Press it at any other point and the volume slider will appear on the screen, but nothing will actually happen. It's counterintuitive to the point that it seems broken.

A speaker grill runs along the entire bottom "chin" on the phone, but it's mostly aesthetic. A single front-facing speaker is on the left side, right below the on-screen back button. We've got no complaints about the speaker—it's quite loud. Along the bottom of the phone there's a headphone jack and a MicroUSB 2.0 port, and on the top is a SIM and—an increasingly rare item on Android phones—a MicroSD slot.