Silent Circle's privacy-focused Blackphone 2 available for preorder, will arrive in September
Silent Circle's Blackphone 2 Landing In September — Silent Circle showed off the second generation of its pro-privacy Android-hardened smartphone, the Blackphone, back in March …
Context & Ripple Effects
This preorder is the commercialization beat of a year-long restructuring arc: February's $50M raise that bought out Geeksphone's stake handed Silent Circle full control of the Blackphone joint venture, and the March reveal of the Blackphone 2 alongside a Blackphone+ tablet set the product stage now being converted into orders.
The launch also carries trust baggage — January brought news that Silent Circle had patched a bug letting hackers remotely decrypt texts on the original device. Court documents that surfaced a year later showed the company generating under $10 million in revenue and cutting 15% of staff amid ongoing litigation with Geeksphone, which makes this September ship date less a routine launch than an early proof point for whether sole ownership could translate into actual sales.
First-order effects
- Buyers get a firm delivery window, and because the Geeksphone buyout left Silent Circle owning the whole Blackphone operation, preorder revenue now lands entirely on its own books rather than being split through the joint venture.
- The launch arrives months after the remote-decryption bug fix, so early reception hinges on demonstrating that the second generation's hardening addressed the credibility hit.
Second-order effects
- With court filings later revealing sub-$10M revenue, the cash demands of manufacturing and fulfilling a hardware run put Silent Circle back in the fundraising market — the $50M Series C it closed in mid-2016 shows that door stayed open, but at the cost of further dilution.
- The buyout did not end the relationship cleanly: litigation between Silent Circle and Geeksphone was still producing damaging disclosures in 2016, including the layoff news, keeping the JV's collapse a running reputational tax on every product announcement.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — niche encrypted-handset makers burning capital against thin revenue while mainstream mobile platforms absorb more encryption by default — the durable value in this market migrates from proprietary devices to subscription software and enterprise services, which is the direction Silent Circle's later financing rounds implicitly bet on.
- For the broader privacy-tech category, each stumble by a flagship independent handset vendor strengthens the argument that privacy features sell better as layers on dominant platforms than as separate hardware ecosystems.
The trend: Standalone privacy smartphones are discovering that niche demand plus hardware economics pushes even well-funded startups toward software-led models, leaving dedicated secure handsets as a proving ground rather than a destination.