Without a shadow of a doubt the BlackBerry Passport is the most polarising smartphone I have ever reviewed. There has not been a single instance where I have taken it out of my pocket to do something and it hasn’t elicited a comment or a remark from someone in the room.
The remarks themselves aren’t those that the standard iPhone vs Android crowd would give me about which phone is better and why, but rather the comments were more out of genuine curiosity and astonishment at the initial sight of the Passport.
The Passport is a smartphone aimed solely at the professional power user, which is to say that if your day is not spend pounding out emails, managing your calendar and browsing through presentations, spreadsheets and documents then the Passport is probably not for you.
It’s also proven to be one of the most difficult reviews to because of how different it is to the other phones in the market. But review it we have, and we can definitively say that the BlackBerry Passport is, well you’ll have to read on to find out.
Design
BlackBerry is one of the first manufacturers in a long while to try something outside of the ‘rectangular glass with square icons’ mould that seems to have befallen the smartphone industry ever since the iPhone became the prototype for success in 2007.
The Passport is short and squat and because most smartphones are around twice as tall as they are wide the Passport feels very strange the first few times you hold it.
Because of the width the BlackBerry Passport is clearly designed to be operated with two hands and as such the fact that it is thicker and heavier than many of its contemporaries is quickly lost by the fact that the mass is divided between your pair of paws.
Personally I almost exclusively use a smartphone in two hands which made adapting to using the Passport rather easier than those coming from an IPhone 5 would for instance.
On the front of the BlackBerry Passport you have the unusual 4.5 inch square, 1:1 display ratio screen. It is flanked by the BlackBerry logo and the speaker grill up top and the iconic BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard which lies just off the sides and the bottom of the phone by virtue of a few millimetres of plastic.
The back of the Passport is a large expanse of smooth plastic with a massive BlackBerry logo dominating the middle and the 13 megapixel camera sitting on high.
A silver band passes through the camera module separating out a small piece of plastic that pops off to allow access to the microSD card and nano SIM slots.
Sandwiched between the front and back is an aluminium frame which, apart from providing a reassuring heft to the BlackBerry Passport also serves as the foundation upon which all of the components are placed. The power button lives in the top part of the frame while the volume buttons are located on the top right with a convenience key stationed in between them.
Because design is so subjective a topic there will be varying opinions on whether the BlackBerry Passport has succeeded in being a beautiful smartphone. For our part the design has succeeded in differentiating it from the pack and cramming in a host of features that the BlackBerry has assured us are of utmost importance to the keyboard faithful power user.
Hardware
We’d like to welcome BlackBerry to the year 2013 in the hardware world. With its Qualcomm made 2.26GHz quad core Snapdragon 800 processor and 3GB of RAM as well as the 13 megapixel camera it matches last year’s Galaxy note 3 from Samsung.
While its 1 440×1 440 pixel display manages to easily best that of the Note 3 in the pixel density race, it only manages to outstrip the Galaxy S4 by a smidge at 453 pixels per inch against the 441 of the S4.
Hardware is a subjective metric however when comparing different operating systems to each other as BlackBerry, like Apple, controls every aspect of the power needs of its software which Android manufacturers cannot lay claim to.
That said, this year’s Snapdragon 801 toting smartphones have not advanced far from their 2013 brethren and BlackBerry’s choice in hardware is suitable for the task at hand.
The keyboard is strangely both the most useful and yet infuriating feature of the BlackBerry Passport. The keyboard is touch enabled which allows you to use it as a scroll bar to move up and down lists, websites or social feeds but because it’s located so close to the bottom of the device I would that it just wasn’t as comfortable to type on as the BlackBerry Q10 was.
There are also only the three rows of keys available to type on which means that everything else including the ‘uppercase’ and number keys are all software based and in a world of SwiftKey where I can choose to customise the layout of my digital keyboard to suit my exact needs, the physical BlackBerry keyboard, while fantastically good, just doesn’t add benefit to me in any way.
The keyboard takes a while to get used to and no doubt those hankering for a physical set of keys will be giving the BlackBerry Passport more than just a cursory glance and perhaps they are right to as once you have the hang of swiping up on the touch enabled board to select predicted words, typing can become fast and intuitive.
Software
BlackBerry’s home grown BlackBerry 10 OS is now in its third major revision and the BlackBerry Passport arrives bearing the latest version of that software with all of its additions.
After signing a deal with Amazon, the Amazon App Store is now a part of the OS and makes it easy for BlackBerry 10 users to download Android applications from a reputable source. While the collection is nowhere near as extensive as the Google Play store, many of the most popular apps that aren’t available for BlackBerry’s app store are in Amazon’s and more often than not they work without a hitch.
One new feature that had me intrigued was the addition of a virtual assistant to the BlackBerry 10 OS in the form of the Assistant app. It’s powered by Wolfram Alpha which powers many of the computational parts of Apple’s Siri, but lacks any sort of personality that we’ve come to expect from the voice inside your phone. Speaking of the iPhone, BlackBerry Assistant also has the same kind of universal search you would find from Spotlight in iOS which searches through everything on your phone to find a result.
The new BlackBerry Blend software lets you access several features of your BlackBerry 10 smartphone via the internet including being able to check through and send email and text messages. Blend allows you to keep up with all of your work mail and calendars from any PC without having to set them up first which could be an interesting selling point for those who are entrenched in the corporate world where BlackBerry still holds some sway.
Tellingly BlackBerry Blend available on iOS and Android tablets as well as Windows and Mac computers which shows just how much BlackBerry realises that people use products that it doesn’t make (remember the ill-fated PlayBook).
Display
As mentioned before the 4.5 inch IPS display in the BlackBerry Passport has a 1 440×1 440 resolution giving it a 453ppi density which makes for fantastic viewing no matter what the content.
Text is beautifully crisp and the ‘reader’ mode in the browser quickly became our favourite way to consumer the words on any news site by removing all of the guff around them.
That 1:1 aspect ratio makes watching video and movies on the display a completely awkward experience with tonnes of wasted space however it also makes reading test a much more pleasurable experience with less scrolling down when compared to a candy bar phone in landscape orientation and less eye strain from small lines of text that a portrait orientated phone.
Using the touch enabled keyboard as a scroll bar on the right of the phone was definitely the best way to consume articles and emails so long as you had no need to type any replies.
Camera
BlackBerry has never been particularly accomplished at imaging and the Passport is really no different here. While the 13 megapixel optically stabilised sensor’s photos aren’t bad they’re nowhere near as good as those produced by Samsung, Nokia and Sony’s cameras.
The software has been tweaked to give users a panorama and burst mode and you can now shoot video in 720p and 1080p at up to 60 frames per second but the changes have not made the images any more than passably average which is perfectly alright for a phone that is a business tool that doesn’t profess to have superb imaging ability.
Battery life
To describe the BlackBerry Passport’s battery life in one word is difficult because so many spring to mind. ‘Amazing’, ‘incredible’, ‘best available’ all offer some inkling into just how fantastic the massive 3 450mAh battery truly is.
No matter how hard we pushed the BlackBerry Passport, playing games, watching videos and using social media the battery just kept going. On most days of regular high-usage the Passport would start at 7AM and only see a charger again at around 11PM and would consistently get there with 40% or more battery remaining.
This is one area in which there can be no doubt that BlackBerry have made the ultimate smartphone for the hard-core road-warrior because it just refuses to die no matter how much you have to use it.
Conclusion
The BlackBerry Passport will never appeal to everyone because it’s not meant to. It’s a businessman’s phone made with all of the features that would be advantageous to that kind of lifestyle.
It’s by no means a perfect smartphone but what it may just be is the perfect smartphone for those who are serious business types and perhaps that’s all that BlackBerry cares about making right now because those are the people who still love BlackBerrys.
