The Blackphone is a pro-privacy phone being developed by Spanish startup Geeksphone, in partnership with Silent Circle using an Android build called PrivatOS.
The phone features Silent Phone and Silent Text for secure, encrypted telephony and messaging — using Silent Circle’s secure network — so that only you and someone also using a Blackphone or using Silent Circle’s service on another device are privy to the contents of the messages. The phone has many other security-oriented features.
The Blackphone will ship in June — with a price-tag of $629 — but the company has already started taking pre-orders via their site.
The founder Javier Agüera explain the PrivatOS:
We modified some default behaviors of Android and some security flaws that we found, and we call that PrivatOS. It’s just small modifications of the Android core.
For example the default crypto engines — there’s a list of crypto engines that the system by default uses… and in the first version of Android the first option was good enough, then they changed it for something that is terrible. So we reverted that to what it was before.
Link: Blackphone
Silent Phone and Silent Text are built into the phone to provide safe, encrypted calling and texting.