fliptop writes:
"Promising that orders will start shipping in June, Silent Circle has announced the Blackphone is ready for pre-orders. (Domain registered in Switzerland)
Touted as 'The high-end smartphone which puts privacy and security ahead of everything else' the Blackphone has a 4.7" screen, 2GHz quad-core CPU and 16GB storage. It also includes several Silent Circle apps.
The Blackphone makes use of a customized version of Android called PrivatOS, is fully unlocked, and the encryption can be used on any compatible network. Purchase includes a 1-year subscription to the apps; after that it's $10 a month (in addition to your carrier's charges).
In order to take advantage of the encryption, the other person you're communicating with has to have their own Blackphone or use Silent Circle apps on their Android or iOS phone."
(Score: 5, Informative) by bah on Monday February 24 2014, @06:47PM
I am a paying subscriber to Silentcircle's android and windows software. The quality of their windows desktop software actually makes me a little nervous about shelling out this much money for a hardware product they're involved with.
The user-interface of the windows software is rudimentary at best and doesn't support simple things like the ability to select the input webcam device. So if you're on a system with two webcams (for example a built in laptop webcam of my Lenovo Yoga with an external USB webcam plugged in), you're stuck with the Silentcircle software only using the built in webcam. In fact, on my desktop, since I have no built in webcam, I can not get their software to work at all with my USB external webcam, rendering the software unusable for video conferecing. I even sent an email to Silentcircle about this and received zero response, which as a paying customer I was not too pleased about.
The android software is better, and mostly just works, but I do get frequency disconnects.
I really want Silentcircle to succeed here, but my initial impression having only used their software for a couple of weeks, is that they are a really tiny company and not up to the task of mass-scale support of their software to paying customers.