Generally we don’t associate Boeing with phones. This is because Boeing doesn’t make phones — they make airplanes and stuff you use to collect information about people and/or kill them, from airplanes.
Except now they apparently want to make a smartphone, and not just any smartphone: a super-secure Android that government types can use to both take that 3am call and play “Angry Birds” on.
National Defense Magazine, a trade publication that focuses on business and technology in the defense sector, reports that the so-called “Boeing Phone” will be designed to be more inexpensive than similar proprietary secure devices that can cost tens of thousands of dollars each, but will not compete directly with BlackBerries, iPhones, and other consumer products.
Boeing executives said the phone is near the end of the development cycle and should be available in the last part of 2012.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first super-secure Android phone being developed for the government. The National Security Agency (that is, the people who are reading my email, your email, and this entry as I’m typing it: hi, guys!) has developed “Project Fishbowl” — a heavily secured and encrypted phone that you can actually homebrew yourself with the NSA’s handy directions.
So, yeah, maybe you guys could start selling these to the taxpayer on the street, because we really don’t trust Google. Or Apple. Or anybody, really.