BlackBerry officially launched the new Passport smartphone in Singapore tonight. It has actually gone on sale with the three main Telcos in Singapore for S$938 (incl. GST but excluding line contract) on 26 September.
First impressions: Overall, the BlackBerry Passport is a handsome and sturdy smartphone that puts greater productivity on the fingertips of road warriors.
The square-screen design is really unique and gives a beefy look to the phone.
The build looks sturdy and with the squarish aspect ratio, is probably less bendable than the usual longish form factor of regular smartphones.
The BlackBerry Passport with a square screen.
The wider screen makes reading documents a lot easier, without having to scroll left-right in addition to scrolling up and down.
The Passport is definitely too wide for one-handed operation – but who uses a BlackBerry with one hand anyway?
And since people expect to use two hands when using the Passport, ladies with smaller palms may not object too much to the increased girth of the new smartphone.
As expected, the physical QWERTY keyboard makes typing so much easier than on a virtual keyboard onscreen, especially for ladies with long nails.
Something unique is that the physical keypad is touch-enabled – you can swipe up and down to scroll, and even use it like a touch-pad when controlling the cursor on screen.
The classic BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard which is now touch-enabled on the Passport.
I like the BlackBerry Blend that enables a user to peruse most of his/her messaging platforms on a single device other than the smartphone.
You can now receive/send emails and SMS from a laptop or tablet without having to pick up the phone just to check/reply to an SMS.
It will work across desktop operating systems, including Mac OS X 10.7 +, Windows 7+ and Android tablets running Android 4.4+ via cellular, USB or Wi-Fi connections.
Support for third party messaging apps such as Watsapp is yet to be added.
Side views of the BlackBerry Passport.
With new CEO John Chen’s strategic direction to focus BlackBerry on business/enterprise customers, the Passport is designed to enhance productivity for the road warrior.
In terms of apps, users have access to BlackBerry World as well as Amazon Appstore, which has some 200,000 apps in its inventory.
Interesting thing: every app that’s downloaded from the Amazon Appstore is scanned with BlackBerry Guardian – to make sure it’s not a malware – before it is installed on the Passport.
Tags: Amazon Appstore, availability, BlackBerry, BlackBerry Assistant, BlackBerry World, Blend, first Look, launch, Passport, Singapore, smartphones