Win for privacy at MWC 2014: Anti-NSA Blackphone launched for $629

In keeping with its promise, Silent Circle and Geeksphone have launched their anti-NSA smartphone, Blackphone , at MWC 2014. Blackphone is a privacy-oriented smartphone designed to not only make secure phone calls and send/receive data, but the device will also ensure that the content stored on the phone is secure from snooping. The privacy-focused device is now available for pre-order at $629 which translates to Rs 39,400.   The smartphone bundles a two-year subscription to Silent Circle and promises encrypted phone calls and e-mail for the user and up to three friends, irrespective of the handset owned. It also includes two years of Disconnect anonymous Wi-Fi and two years of SpiderOak anonymous cloud storage. After the two year subscription period, users can continue to use the services from Silent Circle apps by paying $10 per month.   The full Silent Circle suite of applications includes Silent Phone, Silent Text, and Silent Contacts. These apps, designed with keeping privacy at their core, require the user to connect to the internet using their smartphones or tablets and both parties must have the apps installed in order to keep things private between them. The phone will work like any other phone, but gives users control over privacy and security using these apps.   In terms of hardware specs, the smartphone sports a 4.7-inch HD IPS display, 8MP camera, 16GB onboard storage and comes powered by a 2GHz quad-core processor with 2GB RAM. It supports 3G as well as LTE.  Though the Blackphone is based on Android, it runs a highly skinned fork of Android dubbed PrivatOS. As the phone runs a variant of the Android OS users don’t need a Google account for initial activation, but will be permitted to add one if they wish to use the standard Google apps.