Blackberry Passport Review

When we heard the smartphone word we usually think about 4 or 5 inches smartphone with pocket friendly nature. Welcome to the new era of the smartphone design with Blackberry Passport. Design is never seen before, next gen of device is here with best physical keyboard experience. Blackberry is literally and completely changed the looks and experience of a smartphone with the launch of Passport.

Build Quality

Blackberry Passport looks bigger with good build quality. It has nice solid plastic finish rear back cover which gives a great feel in yours hands. But its awkward dimensions are both pro and con of the device.

The display is square with 4.5-inch 1,440×1,440-pixel resolution, with a pixel density of 453ppi. And the dimensions are 5.03 inches tall, 3.55 inches wide, and 0.37 inches thick. I’ve personally found that the device is uncomfortable to handle in some situations, I dropped the device twice in the traffic in a hurry.

Keyboard is main asset for the Passport, it is touch enabled. You can swipe on the keyboard to scroll through web pages, apps, and emails. Unfortunately single handed typing on the device is literally impossible. You’ll need to use both of your hands type and operate the device.

Features & Performance

The Blackberry Passport is built with solid hardware that Blackberry has ever made. The weight of the device is 6.91 ounces and it is equipped with 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801, 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage and expandable upto 128GB using Micro SD card. To run all these it is equipped with 3450 mAh non-removable battery.

Network performance is good, the audio quality in phone calls is definitely up to the mark. Big sizes comes with big battery, the 3450mAh battery means a full day without the need of a recharge.

OS

It comes with latest version if BB10.3 OS which is a decent performer when compared to the Blackberry 10. The widgets are feature rich, the concept completely adopted from the Android widgets. The new virtual assistant is a great feature, it is a complete take on Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri. The best part of the BB 10.3 OS is support for Android apps via the Amazon Appstore.

The HUB feature is a great time saver, user can easily check and respond to all your conversations like email, text, BBM, phone calls, social media and more in a single UI.

It is a professional device, Passport comes with Blackberry Blend, which lets you connect various device like Android tablet, iPad’s and even a Windows PC to Passport USB or cellular network or Wifi to share the documents, emails across the devices.

Apart from the great features and apps offered by the OS, you still feel missing the Google apps like Hangouts and Instagram. The screen looks beautiful and clear even in daylight, but the square display is not optimised for Apps. You can see some black empty space on the screen while running the apps.

Verdict

Hmm, I feel after using the device. For me it is a professional phone with a unique design. Sometimes I feel bit tensed holding the device while taking from pocket and walking, but however I managed to adopt the concept. Literally, it is not a bad attempt from Blackberry, it needs some polish from OS side to improve the aesthetic of the device.

Blackberry Passport.