BlackBerry phones still offer the best security of any other smartphones around but what if you want something that, much like Spinal Tap’s famous amplifiers, pushes your security up from a 10 to an 11? If you’re in the market for a BlackBerry that’s more-secure-than-secure then German company Secusmart GmbH has something for you, provided you have the cash.
Secusmart GmbH is the company that provided German chancellor Angela Merkel with a beefed-up BlackBerry Z10 after revelations broke that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on her phone conversations. Bloomberg reports that Secusmart GmbH is now selling its heavily encrypted BlackBerry phones to anyone who wants one, not just government officials. The phones will carry a hefty price tag of €2,000 (USD$2,700) but Secusmart GmbH is betting it will be worth it to many consumers and businesses who value their own privacy over anything else.
“Voice encryption used to be a niche that only intelligence services were interested in,” Secusmart CEO Hans-Christoph Quelle tells Bloomberg. “That niche is widening now. We want to look at private customers, but we definitely have to go after companies this year.”
Quelle went on to explain that Secusmart’s modified BlackBerry phones have been made with extensive cooperation from BlackBerry itself, which saw Secusmart’s additions as a way to keep important government and business officials on BlackBerry phones.
“The fact that BlackBerry wasn’t doing so well surely helped us,” Quelle tells Bloomberg. “If Samsung aims to ship 100 million new Galaxy devices and we tell them the German government wants 2,000, they have little reason to tweak their software.”
