[markmall]

Financial Times has a story about a new Israeli startup selling very high end Android smartphones. Price? $10,000.

The tech industry is getting flooded with too much cash. Still, if you just check out the images for this device you can see the company has more marketing panache than BlackBerry ever will.

Name of company is Solarin.

I wonder if security is so important why can't BlackBerry market its old BES servers and OS. People shouldn't use the same phone for playing as they do serious work handling sensitive information.

I had a friend in finance and his firm forced everyone to carry an old BlackBerry along with their personal phones.

Posted via CB10

[Ment]

In a couple of weeks you won't hear about this company again. Last year's specs and still on Lollipop for $16K. It's not even really stylish.

[ChainPunch]

You don't market or try to sell products that are end of life and/or no longer in production.

Posted via CB10

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I doubt that their customers are worried about specs...


The question is how large is the market.... if they only hope to sell 5,000 units, that might be a real possibility for them and a viable business model. Wouldn't work for BlackBerry...

[markmall]

How do they sell security on Android? Is it bluster I wonder.

Posted via CB10

[Ment]

How do they sell security on Android? Is it bluster I wonder.

Posted via CB10

It just has a hardware activated special mode that only allow encrypted communications. It'd be like if PRIV had a side button that once pressed you'd only being to use BBM Protected for communication.

[howarmat]

This really isn't like bb strategy. BB still need to sell millions for them to stay in hardware business while this company only needs thousands. Granted It is much higher cost phone. The market overlap is very small between the two imo

[LazyEvul]

This thing is security theatre at its most absurd. It doesn't even run Marshmallow, for Christ's sake - Android M packs significant security improvements over Lollipop, and is still generally considered less secure than iOS. The hardware-activated encrypted comms mode, although interesting, doesn't seem particularly useful. If you're going to remember to turn it on, certainly you'd just as easily remember to use a secure app like Signal for all your communications? And will it allow an app like Signal to run when that mode is enabled, or will it force you to use a proprietary solution that hasn't undergone the same kind of scrutiny?

Just buy an iPhone, use a long alphanumeric password, and call/text through Signal or WhatsApp. You'll be more secure, and you'll have fifteen grand left to **** away.

Having said that, there are plenty of rich suckers out there, so hey... maybe it'll succeed.