Introduction and design
BlackBerry’s square-shaped new flagship is here, and it’s just as weird in real life as it looks in the promotional pictures. It’s a square, boxy little device with a metallic trim and a dumpy physical keyboard attached to the bottom. Ergonomics? Screw ’em.
And yet, dig a little deeper and there might just be something there after all. The little 4.5-inch slab boasts a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM. There’s 32GB of storage, a microSD slot and a rear-facing 13MP camera.
BlackBerry’s also confident that the new form factor best suits those business customers that are the unabashed target of this device. The company says the screen will incorporate 60 characters in a line, compared to the 40 on an average rectangular smartphone.
The former phone heavyweight has a long way to go to recapture past glories and previous handsets like the BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 failed to impress. This seems different though; it’s not a case of following the crowd, it’s a case of genuinely trying something different.
Design
The biggest talking point about the BlackBerry Passport comes from its, ahem, unconventional appearance. People will notice it, and they’ll ask about it. The design is based around the 4.5-inch square screen that, with a 1:1 aspect ratio, is unlike any other smartphone on the market.
There’s no portrait or landscape mode to be had here – it’s a perfect square. This begets the obvious question of why… why has BlackBerry done this? Well, it ties in to the type of customer the company is focusing its efforts on.
BlackBerry is betting that you’ll be using the Passport for checking spreadsheets, office documents, ebooks, presentations and full-scale websites.
All of which, it says, are reproduced better on the square, 1440 x 1400 Gorilla Glass 3 screen. It’s an undeniably weird-looking phone, but BlackBerry tried to follow the crowd with the BlackBerry Z10 and it didn’t work. So props to the company for attempting something a little bit different.
The second big design point is the return of the keyboard – which was always BlackBerry’s calling card. It’s attached to the bottom of the screen with a somewhat squat appearance – due to dropping from four rows of keys to three.
This means common punctuation marks, as well as numbers, appear as on-screen keys directly above the physical buttons.
Once you get past the…interesting…form factor, the Passport is an attractive handset. There’s a stainless steel trim that runs along the edges of the phone while the back is a soft rubberised plastic that’s comfortable to grip while you fire out emails from the keyboard.
You’ll find three physical buttons on the right hand side, used to control volume as well as pause music or video playback. The power switch meanwhile is on top of the handset (as is the 3.5mm headphone jack) and placed slightly right-of-centre.
Given the width of the phone, it’s pretty tricky to hit this when you’re operating it one handed. I found it easier to slide upwards on the capacitive screen to unlock the phone.
There’s a slight heft to the 194g BlackBerry Passport; but the Canadian company has kept the chassis to a fairly standard 9.3mm thickness. It’s a device that needs to be held to be really appreciated and while I was using it, it reminded me of the original PalmPilot PDA from the mid-90s. Take from that what you will.
It’s clear the design of the BlackBerry Passport is more suited to the inside jacket pocket than the one on the sides of your jeans.
And the size means it’s much easier to use with two hands than one. In fact, it’s very tricky to use one-handed. This is a phone meant for prolonged productivity rather than a quick bout of social media browsing.
Key features, battery and camera
Keyboard
Having always looked favourably on physical keyboards – a particular favourite was the Nokia N97 – I was anxious to get going with the BlackBerry Passport’s offering.
In practice, using the keyboard is a really nice experience – there’s decent travel on the keys and each button is backlit so you can type away in the dark. It’s comfortable thanks to the moulded keys and there’s enough space that you don’t mis-hit a letter.
However, I have to admit that speed will (initially) take a hit for anyone used to bashing out texts on a touchscreen. Which, these days, is pretty much everyone.
The keyboard itself has touch functionality built into it so a swift double-tap activates a bubble-like cursor that you can use to scan your message or email.
You can also swipe directly across the keyboard to scroll up or down websites, leaving the screen free to view. It’s a small, but nice feature that adds a bit of extra usability to the keyboard.
BlackBerry Blend
The new BlackBerry Blend feature lets you effectively access your phone remotely via an encrypted Wi-Fi connection from any PC, Mac or Android tablets. All the content (messages, documents, media) stored on the Passport are accessible in real time and changes you make are reflected on the handset.
During the brief demo I was given, this looked to be a really useful feature and – as for the security requirements – I was told that none of the data remains on the login device after you close the software down. The principle behind it is that you can still access your phone even if you’ve left it at home or the office.
BlackBerry Assistant
Joining the ranks of Siri on the iPhone 6 and Microsoft’s Cortana is the BlackBerry Assistant. Like the aforementioned digital PAs, you can use the Assistant to set reminders and prompt you with the weather as well as dictating search terms.
I gave it a quick try, and in most cases it picked up on my question. There’s a bit of a wait time as the Passport casts around for the answer though. The Assistant currently recognises commands in English, German, Spanish and Italian.
Battery
BlackBerry is making a bold claim when it comes to the 3,450mAh battery. The company says that it will provide up to 30 hours of mixed use for a “very active user”. That’s in part due to the latest iteration of the BlackBerry 10 OS which, the company says, has made significant improvement when it comes to power consumption.
The company has a vested interested in being bullish about battery life as, given the target customer for the Passport, it’s likely to be a chief concern. The handset charges via a microUSB port on the bottom of the phone and should take only a couple of hours to juice up completely.
Unlike other prominent handsets, there isn’t any kind of power saving mode that turns off the non-essential or intensive apps in order to save power. Presumably, BlackBerry is confident enough of the battery prowess of the Passport that it deems such things unnecessary.
Camera
BlackBerry has equipped the Passport with a 13MP rear-facing camera with an LED flash and a couple of extra features like panorama, burst mode and time shift. There’s an LED flash as well as the option to take images at 16:9, 4.3 and the Passport’s own 1:1 aspect ratio.
Full HD 1080p video is supported, and you’ll be able to get 720p video calling from the Passport’s 2MP front-facing camera. Interacting with the camera is done via the touchscreen, as you pinch to zoom in and out and tap to set the focal point.
First impressions are that the camera is solid without really offering much of a challenge to the established smartphone titans. There’s built-in intelligence for suggesting the best shooting mode for the conditions you’re in and the Passport also boasts HDR for capturing light and dark contrasts.
Additionally, BlackBerry has built optical image stabilisation (OIS) into the Passport’s camera to eliminate judders. It’s a feature become adopted elsewhere (like the Apple iPhone 6 Plus) and really helps when taking pictures quickly.
A nice touch is that you can use either the volume keys on the right hand side of the device, or the space bar on the keyboard, to take a picture. There’s also BlackBerry’s dedicated Pictures app for adding filters and effects to your shots after you’ve taken them.
There’s also a Story Mode that’ll stitch together your pictures and videos for an on-the-fly slideshow set to music.
The camera isn’t the headline feature of this smartphone and I doubt you’d be using it extensively for picture taking. This isn’t really a device for the Instagram crowd but, that being said, it’ll handle the basics with comparative ease.
Performance, UI, screen and early verdict
Performance
Make fun of the boxy screen all you want, but BlackBerry has put some serious muscle into the Passport. It runs on a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with a massive 3GB of RAM. Combine that with the integrated nature of the operating system and you’ve got a very smooth, very quick device.
There’s 32GB of native storage on board, but you can boost that up that to 128GB thanks to the microSD card nestled next to the nanoSIM slot.
Connectivity-wise, you’re looking at Bluetooth 4.0 LE, NFC, Wi-Fi and LTE in terms of wireless and a single physical microUSB port. BlackBerry provides a SlimPort HDMI adaptor that plugs into the port and lets you hook the Passport up to a monitor or TV.
On paper, the Passport has enough under the hood to go up against some of the best smartphones out there and, while it’s got a tailored audience, any user is going to appreciate the power.
Multitasking in particular works well, given the amount of RAM on offer and the tiled homescreen that shows currently running apps lets you quickly dive in and out of active programs.
Interface
BlackBerry’s newly updated BB10 OS is as much a USP of the Passport as it’s interesting design. It’s focused around BlackBerry Hub that compiles all your notifications from various email and social network accounts.
Swiping right takes you to the aforementioned open apps screen and a second right swipe takes you to the grid layout for app shortcuts.
On top of BlackBerry Hub is the Priority Hub, which learns the interactions that are important to you and collects them into a single stream. You can also manually tailor this to your liking. Even a small amount of time using this feature is rewarding as I was suddenly spared the hassle of jumping between apps to check updates.
Apps were a massive downfall of earlier BlackBerrys, but the company has remedied this to an extent by partnering with Amazon. The full Amazon Appstore (some 250,000 apps) are available to use on the Passport.
There’s also BlackBerry World, which is the company’s own app store with curated content that, as you’d expect, caters towards the business user.
Screen
Some apps I tried, like Wikipedia or Yahoo Mail, adapt well to the 1:1 screen while others (notably gaming and media) like Sonic Racers suffer from the shift from widescreen. Gaming is far from the Passport’s strong point.
There’s no way of using the physical keyboard with the games and trying to tilt the device to steer/move is really hampered by the shape of the chassis. I won’t dwell on it though, because this is not a device meant for gaming – although a modern smartphone should be able to cope with any task thrown at it.
Media in general doesn’t really hold up on the 1:1 screen. Movies are well reproduced on the 1440 x 1400 screen, chiefly because of the massive 453 pixel density. But there’s no getting away from the letterbox lines that appear on the top and bottom of the screen.
You can change the picture to full-screen, but you’re going to lose some of the action off each side. If you consume vast amounts of video on your phone, this isn’t the device for you.
Early Verdict
The BlackBerry Passport is a phone that’ll receive interest and dismissal in equal measure. It’s a strange-looking animal that can’t help but draw the eye even though most people probably won’t want to use it – too enshrined are they with the 16:9 landscape touchscreen form factor.
Taking into account what BlackBerry is going for though, and it’s a very useful device. Web pages and documents look good, and for keyboard junkies, the return of physical buttons will really appeal. There’s also the fact that it’s got some decent specs on board – including impressive battery life – that’ll see it lasting well through a 24-month contract.
I’m looking forward to even more time with the Passport but in terms of an early verdict, this strikes me as an excellent secondary device for the office warrior.
You won’t be reaching for it over an iPhone 6 or HTC One M8 to watch movies, play games or snap pictures. But then again, if you need a centralised space for work-based emails and need to edit or compile reports during the commute, you’re going to appreciate the 1:1 HD screen and physical keyboard.
It’s BlackBerry doing what it’s always done, but doing it well and with a renewed focus on who actually wants a device like this.
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