If you haven’t heard of Turing phone yet then let us explain. It is a new smartphone that the makers claim to be ‘unhackable’. The smartphone has been shown-off at a few trade shows so it is more than just vaporware now and the company has now started accepting reservations for the smartphone.
The smartphone is available in three different colour/pattern variants namely Beowulf, Pharaoh and Cardinal. It also comes in 3 different storage capacities – 16GB, 64GB and 128GB that retails for US$610, 740 and 840 respectively. The handset shouldn’t be mistaken as being up for pre-order. It is actually only available as a reservation and they don’t actually charge you for it as it is more of showing an interest than actually placing an order for the smartphone.
Apart from being secure, the smartphone also has a very unique angular-design which is IPX8 water resistant and is made up of an alloy the company calls “Liquidmorphium”. They claim that the material is stronger than steel and while the smartphone isn’t exactly what we would call sleek, the design is definitely eye-catching.
It is interesting to note that in order to achieve this ultra-secure tag, the phone lacks a USB port and headphone jack. Instead it relies on a proprietary jack to charge itself and you get a Bluetooth headset in bundled in the box for audio. The phone is also encrypted end to end as it has a public key to send messages to a user and a private key to decrypt them. All this encryption and decryption is handled locally as well to make sure there are no compromises in terms of security.
The smartphone is no slouch either when it comes to hardware as it is powered by a Snapdragon 801 processor and comes with 3GB of RAM. It also has a 13 megapixel rear camera and an 8 Megapixel front facing camera. There is a fingerprint sensor for authentication and a 3000 mAH battery powering the device. There is 4G LTE support, NFC and the phone will run on a heavily encrypted version of Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box.