Silent Circle has announced its privacy-by-design smartphone the Blackphone 2 will support Google’s BYOD-friendly enterprise mobility management program Android for Work.
Announced earlier this year, Android for Work is Google’s attempt to promote its smartphone ecosystem as business-ready, with a raft of features designed to appeal to enterprise IT managers.
These include the ability to provision secure and separate business and personal profiles on the same device, remote management for IT admins, and app whitelisting.
The platform is a good fit for the Blackphone 2, announced this week, which will aim to build on the success of its predecessor – one of the first smartphones designed and built specifically with privacy in mind.
It’s slated to come with the same Silent OS and encrypted applications so users can make secure voice and video calls, file transfers and text messages.
“With the first Blackphone, we delivered an Android experience coupled with control over app permissions and the powerful Spaces feature, which lets users securely separate work life and personal life on the same device. Customers responded to Blackphone’s unique offering of privacy by design, and pushed us to offer even more choices for its second generation,” said David Puron, Silent Circle SVP of Engineering and Devices.
“Our Blackphone 2 release this fall will bring support for Google Play and Google Mobile Services to Silent OS. And with support for Android for Work, companies can strike their own balance of control over data and connectivity with established productivity services that are used throughout [the] enterprise.”
The new Blackphone will offer faster processing speed, with an octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor clocked at 1.7GHz.
It will also feature a larger display (5.5in 1080p) than the first iteration, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with microSD card support, and a better, 13-megapixel, camera, with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.
Silent Circle is also based in privacy-conscious Switzerland, theoretically out of the reach of the NSA.
Several encrypted email services are based there for the same reason, including the resurrected TrueCrypt.