 You don't need me to tell you that BlackBerry's had a rough few years. Nobody's buying its phones anymore, and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system has pretty much been a flop. So to fix all that, BlackBerry's releasing this phone, the $700 Priv, and guess what? It runs real Android, but it still has some of that classic BlackBerry DNA. This is the phone that's supposed to save the company. Let's see if it's up to the job. Let's start with the great stuff. This might be the best hardware that BlackBerry's ever put to market. It starts with a lovely 5.4-inch curved AMOLED display. The pixels melt away, and you can tweak the color settings to your liking. The Snapdragon 808 processor and 3 gigs of RAM usually keep things moving at a steady clip, and there's expandable storage here, too. BlackBerry put a really grippy material on the back that makes this big phone surprisingly easy to hold, even with the keyboard open. The battery is huge, and it usually gets me through the day. But you want a BlackBerry for the keyboard, and so the screen slides up to reveal one. And BlackBerry managed to do it without making the phone feel thick or even awkward in its open. And is it any good? Yeah, it is. Look, here's the deal with physical keyboards on phones. I like them. I think they feel great to type on, and yes, I know you can type way faster on a touchscreen, but you know what? You can optimize for a lot of stuff on a computer that doesn't necessarily feel good, and typing on this phone, I think feels great, and really, that's all that should matter. The keyboard also has some neat extra features. You can slide your finger on it to scroll, you can double tap to move the cursor around, and there are handy shortcuts in some apps. You can swipe up to auto-complete words, swipe down to get a big list of symbols. It's almost like the perfect melding of classic BlackBerry and modern Android. And it's that almost that gets me. BlackBerry has a lot of really good ideas about how to make Android better, but it falls down on the execution. I've had this thing get crazy hot, I've had it hard crash on me, I've pocket dialed people, and a bunch of notifications just aren't coming in. The priv is just too buggy. But beyond the bugs, there are other problems with the software. Take the BlackBerry Hub. It lets you take all sorts of incoming messages, email, text, Twitter, Facebook, and combine them all in customizable views so you have a one-stop shop for all the stuff that people throw at you every day. But it doesn't work well with Gmail, it kicks you out to other apps all the time, and realistically, BlackBerry is never going to get enough third-party support to make it a real success. The Hub should be great, but it's just not there yet. You can turn off all this BlackBerry stuff and just use it like a regular Android phone, and if the company can kill these bugs, it would be a great phone. The camera actually takes pretty good photos, even in low light, but it's just embarrassingly slow and that's not okay anymore. This thing is called the priv, which is short for privacy, and BlackBerry nails that. It's better than your average Android phone at helping you know that it's secure, that's thanks to a little piece of auditing software called D-Tech. BlackBerry's security and privacy tools seem really smart, but beyond the Wall Street set, I'm not sure many people are actually clamoring for that. Priv is also short for privilege, which I don't even know what that means, except that I guess you have to be privileged to be able to spend 700 bucks to get a phone that has a physical keyboard. But a lot of the time, this phone doesn't make me feel privileged, it just makes me feel frustrated. I still have a ton of nostalgia for BlackBerrys. The priv is supposed to be the phone that gives me permission to come back, to participate in the big world of apps and Android while keeping all that BlackBerry stuff. That's a good start, it's the right start, and I really do love a lot of the things that BlackBerry is trying to do here. But too much stuff here is either slow or unfinished, and even though it could all be fixed in software updates, waiting for BlackBerry to fix its software is a really old story, and nobody should be nostalgic for that.