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BlackBerry Passport Review: A Perfect Elegant Smartphone For Business Users

by Fahad Saleem

BlackBerry Passport Review: A Perfect Elegant Smartphone For Business Users

BlackBerry passport is the latest invention of Blackberry and is now available in the UK for £599 (one can also pick it from the BlackBerry Store). The set is available in three color schemes –– Black, Noir and Schwarz however the latter two are currently unavailable. Here is a quick review of the set highlighting some of its features.

Dimensions:

The new BlackBerry Passport seems like a giant square drink coaster. Its 5.03 inches tall, 3.55 inches wide and 0.37 inches thick. It’s weighs 6.91 ounces. It’s odd-looking and appears as if someone has stretched a blackberry from its corners. It’s really so close to a passport. It’s much heavier and wider than the Samsung’s release Galaxy Note 4 and also the Apple iPhone 6 Plus. One can hardly use it in single hand.

Blackberry Passport 5

The Passport’s Large View And Heart Touching Keypad:

The Passport has a large square display. It’s a high-resolution 4.5-inch, 1,440×1,440 pixels IPS LCD. The viewing angles are great and colors are accurate. The screen is best to view slide presentations but not every time such as videos have annoying black bars eating up half of the display above and below the content.

Blackberry Passport 3

Below the screen is the secret that makes this phone a true BlackBerry. It has a large physical keyboard, something found in modern phones. But the Passport’s three row layout has some drawbacks. It’s too wide, making it however; impossible to type the simplest words with a single hand and the spacebar jammed in the keys causes the confusion for your thumb.

Blackberry Passport 6

The keys are totally responsive, and the keyboard does have a few unique tricks. The surface of the keyboard is actually sensitive and you can scroll through your web pages or emails by just sliding your thumb across the keys. It’s a weird feeling to scroll with the keyboard and it keeps your fingers from blocking the content that you are looking at on the screen.

 

 Blackberry Passport 4

 

 

The Hub Is A Good Idea But Not Presented Well:

BlackBerry 10’s take on widgets is like a combination of Android’s widgets but it’s not much useful. Recent apps show up in a grid on the home screen but they are temporary. Moreover if you download an app, you will not find where the downloaded app landed If you open the camera, then the other opened apps shut down on their own accord.

Blackberry Passport 2

The latest and worth mentioning feature in BlackBerry is the virtual assistant, BlackBerry’s take on Siri, Google Now, and Windows Phone’s Cortana. You have a wide range of options such as to add reminders, send mails, look for sports scores, search the internet and make calendar appointments and this all can be done just with just your voice. BlackBerry’s voice parsing tech is totally awesome, but the system itself is slower than the assistants on other platforms.

BlackBerry has preloaded the Amazon Appstore on it, providing access to a number of apps that was never available before. Oddly, the BlackBerry App World remains on the device.

Keyboard Comfortable Or Not:

BlackBerry has done to make the Passport a productivity tool, its design is awkward. Between the awkward dimensions and odd keyboard layout, some people do not feel comfortable to work on it.

It would not be right to say that this phone is not good for some people.  For sure, there are a few people who love this device and put up with its shortcomings just to have a big screen and a large hardware keyboard. The Passport is a shrine to everything BlackBerry has ever made over the last 15 years. It’s somehow, the best that BlackBerry can do, but that’s not enough and is much more to come.

 

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