The Boeing Black phone has been in development since 2012 and is primarily going to be aimed at military and government officials. The main selling point is that it will self-destruct if tampered with. On Friday, Blackberry CEO John Chen announced that his company will provide critical software to make it even more secure.
The Black phone features dual SIM cards and an expandable back panel for bio-metric scanners and satellite transceivers, the device has a unique tamper-proof covering that will erase data if it’s disassembled. Not much is known about the hardware, but its supposed to cost $20,000 each to manufacture and has high grade encryption for telephone calls and to provide logistics.
On a conference call John Chen proclaimed “We’re pleased to announce that Boeing is collaborating with BlackBerry to provide a secure mobile solution for Android devices utilizing our BES 12 platform. That, by the way, is all they allow me to say.”
The BlackBerry Enterprise Service is a key part of making the Blackphone secure. It is the Waterloo companies flagship product aimed at the corporate and government sectors. It allow clients to manage and secure not just BlackBerry devices on internal networks, but those that run on rival operating systems such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
We can hardly go a day without hearing about some big hacking scandal. Corporations are regularly attacked by state sponsored data invasions and its hard to have any semblence of privacy anymore. The Black phone is hopefully ushering in a new era where we can finally be secure, for a price.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.