BlackPhone, BP1, PrivatOS, Do you own one? Do you use it? How do you use it?

TheCotMan · February 22, 2015, 08:41

Originally posted by Dark Tangent

Some of us bought BP at DEF CON last year, but now mostly not in use. Mostly due to stability issues, apps not always working reliably, text messages that never arrive, etc. All problems of a 1.0 release. I think we gave up around OS v 1.04.

How is the current version? More reliable?

I've not played with the Silent-* suite of apps yet, "Secure Wireless" or SpiderOakBE, so I have no comment on their stability.

Before using these, I'll want to setup some packet captures to inspect live data, but I have been too busy with other things.

So far, on 1.0.5 and 1.0.6, no crashes in web browsing, or K-9 mail.

The "Smart WiFi manager" (Tool that uses cell tower addresses as geographical references to determine it a WiFi access point by name is valid at the implied location, and if phone should enable WiFi and then try to associate with it) kind of works. It takes a long time to find cell towers. For example, I've been associated with one AccessPoint at home for 48 hours, but it has not found any cell towers to associate with it, but using another access point, the phone has found towers. A third and fourth access point have been used for 24 hours each, and the phone has found no towers to associate with them. All of these are at home. I have more access points to try at home, but only 1 out of 4 have been associated with towers while at home. 4 Access points at work found towers within 2-4 hours.

Occasionally, this being enabled (only enable wifi when close to cell towers that are around pre-learned WiFi access points) will turn off wifi, while I am in range. This is especially annoying when at a "remote location" where wireless provider service is very, weak or does not exist and my only data link is through WiFi.

They claim at least two changes in 1.0.5 to 1.0.6 were one for battery life, and another that addressed this: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/d...=CVE-2015-1474 -- A plus in favor of BlackPhone, as none of my other Android Phones have been upgraded to address that.

Standard Messaging and Phone calling (non-encrypted) works fine. There was an initial instability issue with my service provider over the first 24 hours -- phone would not associate wth network after moving SIM from old phone to this one. It would not ring when called, and could not call others. After about 30 minutes, I was able to call it, but several times over the first 24 hours, it would forget who my wireless service provider was, or my wireless provider rejected my SIM. After 24 hours, no problems with being kicked off my provider's network.

The hardware is a bit limited in band support compared to many other quad-band phones and their bands for data and voice.
I would liked to have had Dual SIM support, but that was not a deal-breaker.
Since it is not a widely used model, I've not found any vendors of larger batteries with custom phone back to accommodate the larger battery. The search continues.

Missing support for RedPhone, TextSecure and OpenVPN absolutely makes BlackPhone something I cannot move entirely over to use. As a result, I have a BlackPhone and another Android phone for normal use, and 2 or 3 other phones for special uses.

I like their goals, and recognize this is a first attempt. I am still happy to have voted my approval in their goals by buying one, and have hopes they and other developers will support it too, but most users of SmartPhones have expectations for using apps that have used before, and they will not be happy with the experience offered as of now. Executives, (CEO, CFO, pretty much all C*O except CTO and CSO won't understand how to manually install apps from APK, or recognize a need to keep up-to-date on OOB installed apps, or recognize the risks involved with installing alternate app stores, such as one from Amazon or the google play store.

Right now, the only market that would likely well receive this in its present state are:
* Techies that can afford it
* People that like many privacy and security-related features of CyanogenMod, who are willing and able to pay for them, and don't want to upgrade their phone's default OS, and then track down security apps to install and hope they work with their version of OS.

I have hopes for their "App Store."

I see no support for FullEncrypted MicroSD. Was annoyed that the phone could not (through menus) allow me to destroy the exFAT MicroSD, and reformat as FAT32 for me. I used my laptop to re-partition and reformat the MicroSD specifying LinuxFS with ext3, ext2, ext4 and variations of encrypted filesystems, but none were recognized by the phone. Gave up, formatted as FAT32, inserted it and that was recognized.

Some background: I was an early adopter of Android. I still own an Android Dev Phone 1 (Commercially similar to "G1") and was shipped Android 1.0, upgraded through to 1.1 and 1.5 and 1.6. I've owned Android Phones on many more versions up through 4.4, and understand the 1.x releases of many things is often less than expected.

I started this thread/topic with hopes others would also contribute through thoughts and experiences with BlackPhone.

Thanks for the reply!

Any other feedback or information is welcome from you and others.

Dark Tangent · February 22, 2015, 07:52

Some of us bought BP at DEF CON last year, but now mostly not in use. Mostly due to stability issues, apps not always working reliably, text messages that never arrive, etc. All problems of a 1.0 release. I think we gave up around OS v 1.04.

How is the current version? More reliable?

BlackPhone, BP1, PrivatOS, Do you own one? Do you use it? How do you use it?

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