<p> <i> 20.22 pm </i> BlackBerry launches $2300 'SecuTablet'

BlackBerry is returning to the tablet market and the company is planning its reentry with the help of Samsung Electronics, IBM and Secusmart, the German encryption specialist acquired by the Canadian firm in 2014.

The new tablet is not the PlayBook 2 that BlackBerry was rumored to be working on, but it is named the SecuTablet, a tablet developed jointly by Secusmart and IBM for a German government department.

The SecuTablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 LTE 16GB loaded with some software from IBM and SecuSmart's special MicroSD card. The tablet comes equipped with a number of cryptographic chips to protect data in motion and at rest.

Samsung's Knox secure boot technology ensures that the OS on the tablet has not been tampered with. IBM has contributed to the security chain by 'wrapping' certain apps in an additional layer of code that intercepts and encrypts key data flows using the Secusmart hardware.

Secusmart managing director Hans-Christoph Quelle has expressed hope that before the end of this year, the German federal IT security agency, BSI, will grant the Knox-Secusmart combination a security rating corresponding to Nato Restricted.

"The project was started long before BlackBerry acquired Secusmart," said Quelle, now a senior vice president at BlackBerry.

He added that serious questions were raised about the deal at the highest level within BlackBerry, IBM and the government department about whether to continue.

The tablet project somehow survived the acquisition and it happened because the shrinking market of the smartphone has prompted BlackBerry to sell its security services across as many platforms as possible.

In November last year, BlackBerry had announced its plans to extend support for its management software to Samsung devices, and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the Ontario-based firm said it would release versions of Secusmart's Secusuite voice and data encryption system.

The SecuTablet will cost around GBP 2,250 ($2,380) including the Secusmart MicroSD encryption card.</p>