BlackBerry Passport is the company's new flagship device that is aimed at luring its core enterprise users away from big rivals such as Samsung and Apple. With the unique square shape design, the Passport is an interesting deviation from the familiar rectangular devices that crowd the market.
The Passport is designed with a square screen display of 4.5 inches and a unique tactile keyboard that is highly touch-sensitive. By comparison, the newly released iPhone 6 of Apple has screen that measures 4.7 inches with a bigger model that measures 5.5 inches.
The company hopes that the device's unorthodox design will bring back its competitiveness against the industry's heavy players.
"BlackBerry is still fighting for survival," said Brian Colello, a Morningstar analyst. "They still need to turn around and develop a viable ongoing business model."
The Passport has the dimension of 128 by 90.3 by 9.3mm and the weight of 194.4 grams. Its 4.5 inch touchscreen display has pixel resolution of 1440 by 1440. It's built with a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor of 2.2 GHz. It also has Adreno 330 GPU, a RAM of 3GB, storage of 32GB, microSD slot for expanding the storage up to 64GB, rear camera with BSI sensor of 13 megapixels, front camera of 2 megapixels, and a battery of 3450mAh which is expected to bring a battery life of 36 hours.
The BlackBerry Passport will most likely support the Nano-SIM technology. Other connectivity options would include Bluetooth, WiFi, Micro-USB, GPS, NFC, GPRS/EDGE, Glonass, 3G and 4G LTE.
One interesting feature of the Passport is the BlackBerry Assistant which is the company's own voice-based virtual assistant. It is debuting first on the Passport device and will be an integral part of the BlackBerry 10.3 OS.
According to BlackBerry CEO John Chen, the Passport will be available in more markets within two weeks after the device is launched. It is purported to cost $599 in the U.S. However, pricing is expected to vary in other places which can be attributed to local taxes. Chen hinted that the device could retail at $700. Still, the company is finding ways to lower down the price in order to make the phone more competitive price wise.
"Within two weeks after Wednesday's launch a lot of places will have the Passport, including markets in Asia," said Chen.
BlackBerry understands that a device's cheaper price tag does not guarantee its success. For this reason, it aims at tapping markets where it can build a solid fan base. These would include industries in architecture, mortgage, healthcare, finance, and web writing.
"Expectations for the Passport are much more modest," said independent technology analyst Carmi Levy. "What matters is how well the Passport is received by BlackBerry's core enterprise customers."
