BlackBerry Limited introduced a white color BlackBerry Passport and a limited edition red color Passport. Everything fits into place: a limited company introduced a limited device.
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Just in time for the holidays, customers in North America will be able to purchase red and white BlackBerry Passports. With the name BlackBerry in mind, the first thing that comes to mind is business. The company that was an obvious choice for business users created a new device trying to reclaim the old glory but it doesn't seem it made a good job. The Passport is a strange device and it brings nothing new and spectacular to the market already full of great devices.
The first thing you will notice is the strange form-factor. The device is thicker, wider, and heavier than other smartphones. At 128 x 90.3mm it really stands out from the crowd but not in a good way, it is hard to operate it with one hand and, remind you, it's a phone not a tablet. There is a square 4.5-inch display with 1440 x 1440 pixels, 453 ppi, which is not something we are seeing on the smartphones, it's more like a desktop display. This is something users definitively are not used to and it seems the company made it just to be different from others.
Below it there is a typical BlackBerry keyboard, a feature that long time BlackBerry users will like. The three-row keyboard doubles as a touch-sensitive trackpad with gestures. There are 3.5mm headphone jack and power button on the top, a micro-USB/micro-HDMI port and stereo speakers on the bottom, and volume up and down buttons on the right side. There are also 4 microphones, a 2MP front camera, and a standard 13-megapixel camera and LED flash on the back. There are also a nano-SIM and microSDXC slots, and the device has a big 450mAh battery.
Now, for business users there are Hub, BlackBerry Assistant, Blend, and Link, well-known software of which the Hub is probably the most interesting. This is a center for all of your communications and alerts in which you'll get all your e-mails, social networks posts, calendars, SMS, instant messaging applications, and a record of outgoing and incoming phone calls. BlackBerry Guardian is there to check for malicious apps but when compared to other security systems it seem rudimentary.
All those specifications are not the problem, the user experience is. True, you can sideload some Android apps but Passport's form-factor is a problem. What's the use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 with a 2.2GHz quad-core on a device that should be a smartphone but it's incredibly difficult to be used with one hand? And if you use two hands for, say, a longer email message, you'll look like someone playing with Nintendo. This is its main problem and, as many would say and we agree, the Passport is plain ugly.
The security should be better for a device that has a corporate market as a target, the ecosystem is small because BlackBerry’s market share is small, it's clumsy to use and the question that comes to mind is whom it is for. There is no doubt, some BlackBerry users will find some features interesting, the keyboard among them, but for all others we can't recommend this device. The Passport is a device that looks more like a "let's try this" device than a well-thought piece of hardware. For a name like BlackBerry that's not good enough. ■
