First Impressions: Is it hip to be square?
BlackBerry says it's not giving up on its phone business, it's simply shifting focus from the people who want to play Candy Crush Saga on the way to work to 'serious business professionals'. The BlackBerry Passport is the first phone to reach out to those people who spend more than half their time sending work emails or browsing through spreadsheets.
Inevitably, the biggest talking point is the shape. BlackBerry says it has based the design on the shape of a passport and thus explains the name. While it might fit nicely held over your passport in a departures lounge, it's wider than the Note 4. Even the biggest palms will find this a tricky one to grip.
It's slim at 9.3mm thick and while the soft touch plastic back is slightly curved, it's not dramatic enough to hide the challenge of holding this in one hand. The Passport does feel well-built at least, and the stainless steel frame goes some way to justifying the £529 price.
The main volume buttons are a stretch on the right edge, as is the headphone jack up top with the on/off button. The micro USB charging port is down below, while there's a micro SD card slot alongside a nano SIM card slot that's hidden behind a compartment above the camera sensor. It's difficult to prise away it from the phone's body, though you shouldn't have to do it often.
Of course, when you think of BlackBerry, you think of physical keyboards and the Passport delivers it with a twist. There are three rows of physical keys instead of the usual four you find on older BB phones and there's no handy keyboard shortcuts. The fourth row is actually replaced with an on-screen keyboard where you can input punctuation and numbers.
The keys on the physical keyboard are raised and have extra touch enabled functionality so they can adapt and behave differently depending on the content on the screen. They do have that nice clicky feel you associate with BlackBerry keyboards, but you need to get both hands involved to use it effectively.
For the display, the Passport goes wider and this means it can fit 60 characters per line, so there's less need to zoom into pages and should in theory deliver a better viewing experience. It's a 4.5-inch LCD screen with an impressive 1,400 x 1,400 resolution and squeezes in 453 pixels per inch, so it's nice and sharp. It uses Gorilla Glass to add another extra layer of protection and improve viewing angles.
BlackBerry makes some bold claims about sound performance with the Passport and feels call quality is something largely ignored by other smartphone manufacturers. The two speakers on the bottom of the phone aim to offer louder speakers than the HTC One M8 and the Galaxy S5. Clearly this is with conference calls and speakerphone use in mind as music doesn't sound great.
The processing power is not far off what you can find in current top-end smartphones with a 2.2 quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a hefty 3GB of RAM under the hood. It has a monstrous 3,450 mAh battery as well, larger than the Note 4 in fact (3,220mAh) and BlackBerry claims it can deliver up to 30 hours of use.
SEE ALSO: BlackBerry Passport vs iPhone 6 
If you want to take a break from work and shoot some pictures, there's a 13-megapixel main camera with an LED flash and optical image stabilization to aid low-light photography. That's at least one thing it has over the iPhone 6.
While the specs make for good reading, much of the Passport's appeal will rely on BlackBerry 10. The gesture-based operating system is playing catch up with iOS, Android and Windows Phone and its latest iteration, 10.3.1 does add some useful features.
Aside from some visual tweaks to the UI, there's now support for the Amazon Appstore, opening up the catalogue of supported apps beyond BlackBerry App World and means you can get hold of Minecraft even before Windows Phone users.
Next up is the the BlackBerry Hub, a unified place for all of your messages, emails and texts. Blackberry 10.3.1 now adds something called 'instant actions', which basically means you do things like accept calendar invites and respond to messages directly inside the hub.
BlackBerry Assistant is also the company's answer to Siri and Google Now. Where Assistant will differ is a much closer integration with your work data. You can speak to your phone or simply type a question and it can be used for searching content on your phone. It all sounds very familiar here.
First Impressions
There's no escaping the awkward first impression this phone makes. It's large, but large in a way we haven't seen before. Still, the original Galaxy Note felt too big as well, so it's something we need to live with first.
Likewise, while the huge battery capacity and sharp screen are great plus points, it's too early to say whether the BlackBerry 10 is mature enough to take on Android and iOS. We'll find out in the coming days as we give it a proper test.
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