Co-founder of Silent Circle, maker of privacy-centric Blackphone, says tablet is coming soon
Privacy-focused Blackphone maker plans tablet ‘soon’ — Encrypted calls are only possible between Blackphone users or other devices running the Silent Phone app
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet tease caps a fast first year for Silent Circle: the company formed the Blackphone joint venture with Spain's Geeksphone in January 2014, showed off the PrivatOS handset in February's hands-on look at the privacy-hardened Android , then pulled in a $30M round in May on the strength of demand for the Blackphone itself.
Through mid-2014 it layered services on top of the device — global encrypted-calling plans pitched against Skype and Viber in July, and a Dutch telco partnership for encrypted calls in August. The co-founder's announcement matters because encrypted calls only work between Blackphones or devices running the Silent Phone app, so every added form factor widens who can join that closed loop.
First-order effects
- A Blackphone-branded tablet would extend PrivatOS beyond the handset, giving existing owners a second endpoint for end-to-end encrypted calls and messaging inside the same walled garden.
- The move leans directly on the $30M raised in May — hardware line extensions are exactly what that funding was framed to support.
Second-order effects
- Because Silent Phone interoperability is the product's core value, each new device type raises switching costs for users already inside the ecosystem while pressuring rivals like Skype and Viber, which Silent Circle has explicitly targeted, on security credentials rather than price.
- Manufacturing partner Geeksphone, whose role was defined by the original handset joint venture, faces a test of whether the partnership stretches to a second product category or whether Silent Circle needs additional hardware capacity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy-focused vendors will compete less on individual devices than on the breadth of their encrypted-device ecosystems — the tablet is a step toward making Silent Circle's app-and-hardware stack a platform rather than a single product.
- The strategy also points toward carrier involvement as a structural requirement: the confirmed Dutch telco work suggests consumer-grade encryption needs telco distribution deals to scale beyond early adopters.
The trend: Post-Snowden demand is pulling secure-communications startups from single devices toward multi-device encrypted ecosystems built on subscription calling services and telco partnerships.