The BlackPhone handset made quite a wave when it was first unveiled and now after it has started shipping, reviewers had a good impressions of it. But BlackBerry thinks it must act and say that their products are better. Let’s have a look at how this fight is profiling to be.

The Blackphone has went on sale this week for $629, and is considered to be the first smartphone built solely with privacy and security in mind. It’s definitely eying business users as the biggest target, but also journalists, dissidents and just about anybody else who is concerned with their security and privacy.

It  runs on a modified version of Android and comes with a set of security features. However, afraid that BlackPhone might steal many of its customers away, BlackBerry has recently said that it offers a “consumer-grade privacy that’s inadequate for businesses”, which led to a response from BlackPhone’s CEO. Here’s what BlackBerry initially said:

“The latest artifact of the so-called Post-Snowden era is the Blackphone, a purportedly secure smartphone. The phone’s manufacturer, SGP Technologies, started shipping preorders of the $629 device at the end of June. As a pioneer in mobile security, accumulating thousands of patents and dozens of certifications over the past 15 years, BlackBerry welcomes the attention the Blackphone brings to secure communications and digital privacy.

But when it comes to protecting corporate information and end user privacy, meeting compliance requirements and expanding the productivity of your mobile workforce, the similarities we share with Blackphone end with the name.”

Joe McGarvey from BlackBerry then added the following:

“The Blackphone was designed chiefly for consumers. The product’s target market sweet spot appears to be individuals — not necessarily affiliated with an enterprise — requiring eavesdrop-proof communications. The Blackphone appears to be designed to operate outside the realm of IT oversight.

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It’s currently unclear if the Blackphone will support the logging and archiving of business communications conducted on the smartphone, an unacceptable condition for regulated organizations, such as financial services and healthcare firms”

And here’s what BlackPhone had to say, saying that BlackBerry is no longer what it used to be:

“Unfortunately, the world discovered in 2010 that RIM was willing to compromise its integrity if sufficient pressure was applied by governments intent on spying on the messages sent via the ubiquitous devices. Various statements from the Saudi, UAE, Indian, and other telecom regulatory bodies all confirmed the same thing:

RIM made it technically possible for the formerly-secret encrypted messages to be decrypted and viewed. Much speculation surrounds exactly what was done, and whether it remains in place today, but if anything there was more than one approach which achieved the same basic goal: a betrayal of the objectives of privacy.”

They also added:

“The whole point of Blackphone is privacy, choice, and control. This puts the ability to make those decisions back into the hands of the device owner. If it’s a private individual, then they control the whole spectrum of decisions. If it’s a company, then the company chooses what to permit its employees to do with company-owned equipment. But we reject outright the argument that an end-to-end approach is the only viable choice, because it’s that same approach which allowed Blackberry to betray its customers and jettison its credibility.”

So, this basically marks the beginning of a “war” in a field which once belonged entirely to RIM. However, this is going to prove beneficial to consumers, since these two companies will struggle to release better products.

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