Having faced a rather mixed initial reception, inspiration for the BlackBerry Passport has been laid out by the Waterloo Smartphone maker.
BlackBerry has always had a unique knack for going against the grain and coming up with weird and often wonderful Smartphone designs. Never one to go with convention, pushing boundaries and offering something truly different has always been the Waterloo way.
That is of course discounting the very first touchscreen BlackBerry Z10, but just look how far bandwagon-hopping got them in that instance.
On the whole therefore is shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to see the new BlackBerry Passport once again challenge what we’ve come to know as the norm. As far as we’re concerned, Smartphones are and should be rectangular in shape – BB on the other hand has outed a largely square piece of kit.
Of course, critics immediately lashed out at the thing calling it everything from a misfire to an outright abomination, but BlackBerry nonetheless believes there’s a fair amount of potential in its curious 4.5-incher.
“Based on academic typology, the optimal number of characters on a line in a book is 66 characters (current rectangular smartphones show approx. 40 characters and BlackBerry will show 60 characters),” read the ensuing blog post explaining exactly what BlackBerry was thinking with the Passport.
“BlackBerry Passport offers its size and aspect ratio to accommodate these characters, making it the ideal device for reading e-books, viewing documents and browsing the web.”
Roughly translated, the idea is to give the use a better overall experience using 4.5-inches that would be possible even with a standard 5-inch Smartphone. BlackBerry has since its very beginnings worked more with corporate markets and power-users in mind – the Passport appears to be yet another stab at winning over the business world.
As for its chances; there’s no disputing the Passport’s general power and prowess. There’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core CPU backed by 3GB of RAM at its heart, the 13-megapixel camera should take care of things nicely and the physical keyboard remains a desirable selling point for BB devices.
On the whole therefore, we don’t see the Passport so much as entering the same ballpark as its market-leading rivals, but it’s nonetheless an interesting enough addition to BlackBerry 2.0.