There was great anticipation this week surrounding the unveiling of a new and innovative smartphone from BlackBerry, the BlackBerry Passport. The Passport is the world’s first ever completely square smartphone and is aimed firmly at the business mobile phone market. BlackBerry have had a tough time in recent years and are concentrating on creating smartphones to meet the needs of their core market – ‘business professionals’.
The reasoning behind the Passport name is that the shape and design of BlackBerry’s new smartphone is based on an actual passport document. It comes with a 4.5-inch 1400 x 1400 IPS LCD screen which gives it an impressive resolution of 453 pixels per inch. The other distinguishing feature of the Passport smartphone is the physical QWERTY keyboard which is located under the screen. the keyboard has three rows of raised keys and there’s also an additional on-screen row of keys which is used for numbers and punctuation. The set up of the handset’s display means that you can fit up to 60 characters of text in each line to make it easier to type and to read work documents such as spreadsheets and to minimise the need to zoom-in for a better look.
The 13-megapixel camera on the rear is also excellent with an LED flash and optical image stabilisation. On the front of the Passport smartphone is a good quality 3.7-megapixel snapper.
The BlackBerry Passport will run on BlackBerry’s latest 10.3 operating system which has some fantastic new features which include the Blackberry Assistant – similar to Apple’s Siri but also able to access secure work documents. The upgraded BlackBerry Hub now has an ‘instant actions’ mode so you can reply to messages and accept calendar requests from directly inside the Hub. Access to the Amazon Appstore offers a whole range of additional apps to choose from.
The inside of the Passport smartphone also reflects its premium quality with a 2.2ghz quad-core Snapdragon processor combined with a very decent 3GB of RAM. A whopping 3450mAh battery should provide enough charge for around 30 hours of average use. In terms of onboard memory, there’s 32GB of built-in storage which can be increased up to 64GB with a microSD card.
You’ll find details of our Blackberry Passport deals here.
