Blackberry Passport

So a 1,440 x 1,440 screen layered with Gorilla Glass 3 is what you get, and it measures 4.5-inches diagonally. BlackBerry says it should offer the same real estate as a regular 5-inch smartphone display and we don’t disagree. The fact is that thanks to those square dimensions, it becomes easier to work with documents, presentations and spreadsheets, and browsing the web too. Just to give you an example, working with a spreadsheet containing loads of data would usually require quite a bit of scrolling around in either portrait on landscape mode on conventional phones, but on the Passport you should be able view more at similar zoom levels. We’ll discuss some more usability aspects about the square display in the performance section, but as you can fathom, it’s not really ideal for watching widescreen videos.

So what’s special about the Passport’s keyboard? We wondered the same thing before we actually got our hands on it, being unable to fathom what BlackBerry means with a ‘touch-enabled’ QWERTY keypad. Before we get to that however, let’s tackle the symbols bit we mentioned earlier. As you can make out, the keys don’t include any numbers, symbols or special characters, and the way BlackBerry has implemented this is by using a smaller virtual keyboard that appears below the screen whenever you’re in a text input screen (such as composing a new message or email for example). This virtual keyboard offers a basic list of commonly-used symbols but can be expanded to view and enter more too. This hybrid approach takes a while getting used to.

While a valid passport holds enough value by itself, the true gateway that blurs boundaries is actually hidden inside – the visa stamps. On BlackBerry’s Passport, it’s the platform it runs that gives it the power to accomplish what it does and you get the very latest the Waterloo-based vendor has to offer. Version 10.3 of BB OS 10, the latest iteration of BlackBerry’s mobile platform comes loaded on the Passport by default, and brings with it quite a few new and useful features.

The Passport’s 13-megapixel shooter boasts some cool features like optical image stabilisation and 1080p video recording at 60fps – pretty much the best we’ve seen from BlackBerry yet as far as camera specs are concerned. 

BB OS 10 isn’t a very resource-hungry platform, and we’ve seen it work fluidly on devices with much lower specs than the Passport. So much so that the Passport’s 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, Adreno 330 graphics and 3GB of RAM might just be overkill for it. That said, this a powerful hardware combo and bodes well as far as pure number crunching capabilities are concerned. Needless to say, the Passport goes through apps and games like a hot knife through melted butter, and performs very smoothly irrespective of the app you’re using. Multitasking isn’t an issue at all too, with even heavy games like Riptide GP2 running without lag despite multiple Active Frames in the background.