BlackBerry announces its latest Android phone, the DTEK60

The BlackBerry DTEK60 is now official. The company’s third Android-based smartphone is available for the price of $499.

The 5.5-inch smartphone, which comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box, has a Quad HD display. Inside it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of on-board storage, along with a microSD card slot that can support up to 2TB of additional storage. It also comes with a 21-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, along with a 3,000mAh battery.

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BlackBerry is emphasizing the security features on the DTEK60, which it says make the phone more secure for businesses to use compared to other Android devices:

Our manufacturing process makes use of a unique technique known as the Hardware Root of Trust, which adds security keys to the chipsets inside the DTEK60 to prevent the device from being spoofed or counterfeited. Our Secure Bootloader uses multi-stage verification to ensure that the Android OS hasn’t been tampered with, in order to protect business data against hackers rooting the device. We also harden Android to make things more difficult for attackers, protect all data stored on the DTEK60 with FIPS 140-2 encryption, and offer the DTEK app to monitor and fix privacy violations.

The BlackBerry DTEK60 also comes with a fingerprint sensor which will offer a more secure way to unlock the phone without a password, and it can also be used to make online purchases via Android Pay. The phone is compatible with GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile, but not with networks such as Verizon and Sprint.

The new phone is currently available online at BlackBerry’s website in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. If you buy it online on or before November 8 in the US and Canada, you will get a free Soft Shell case and Rapid Charger for the phone. The other countries will get the Rapid Charger for fee, along with a Pocket Case for the DTEK60. Will you be checking out the new BlackBerry DTEK60, especially if you are security conscious?