A few days ago, the crazy BlackBerry Passport reared its… Square head. Over the weekend, Crackberry.com posted a review of a pre-release version of the device.
It fits in dress shirt pockets and you can hold it with one hand. You just need two hands to use it. The battery lasts forever and the screen is a breath of fresh air for the ‘cramped’ Q10 users. The keyboard is a delicious treat that is a different approach compared to anything BlackBerry has done before it and anything that the market has ever seen. The combination of physical and onscreen this time around is exciting and intuitive. It is what we have been waiting for all along. A breath of fresh air.
This seems to be the device BlackBerry should have put out years ago. It’s different, it’s fresh, yet retains what makes a BlackBerry, well, a BlackBerry. This is exactly the kind of device us hardware keyboard lovers need.
Bring it on, BlackBerry. Do it. Release it. Everywhere.
…are so much faster and more convenient, so what is the point. And God, it’s ugly! The year 2005 called and they want their design back.
Edited 2014-07-01 00:00 UTC
Maybe for you, but not for everyone. I’m still most productive with a good hardware keyboard. As much as I love my HTC 8XT, I miss the keyboard of my HTC Arrive and Motorola Photon Q. They both have excellent button layouts and tactile feedback.
As for the “2005 design” quip, I can only assume you mean the fact that it has a fixed hardware keyboard, because the bulky, nearly square design has been used as recently as 2010 with the Motorola Charm. It was a flop, but I think that had more to do with Motorola’s horrendous MotoBlur interface on hardware that could barely run stock Android well, much less that resource-eating disaster of a shell.
How did you type that comment? And where can I find a swipe keyboard for my computer?
Keyboards are so 2005 after all, and I don’t know what I would do with myself if people thought less of me due to the technology I bought with my own money.
I typed it on my Windows Phone 8.1 what else? That model crackberry is going to be a huge flop.
Edited 2014-07-01 03:37 UTC
Looks like wishful cursing..?
The target market is corporate executives not fashion conscious teenagers.
If that is so, then the target market is ridiculously small and if I were a blackberry investor I would have sold my shares yesterday.
Well, have you ever heard the words “a matter of taste?” I, at least, find any and all on-screen keyboards an utter disaster when compared to a proper physical keyboard. Sure, I can enter text with on-screen keyboards, but it requires a whole lot of concentration since I have to keep a close eye to exactly where my fingers are and what’s underneath them — no typing without looking at my own fingers, no. That makes it slow and tedious.
Then there’s things like doing any sort of scripting or things on the command-line; Swype and the likes just suck at such.
Oh, and then there’s the language itself; English is an easy language for Swype and the likes to attack, but try Finnish where you have all sorts of conjugations and alterations everywhere. Hell, Swype, at least, keeps missing double-vowels and double-consonants all the time which means I spend more time fixing its errors than actually typing.
Swiping keyboards do have indeed plenty of issues, but let’s stop pretending just because a phone has some dedicated physical keys that it is a “proper” keyboard. Typing long messages on a “traditional” blackberry device sucked as well.
I did not “pretend” that to begin with. Of course not all keyboards are created equal and I, quite frankly, have only experience with Nokia-phones with keyboards — no BlackBerry – experience whatsoever.
I have had the Nokia 5510 and I still have a Nokia N900 and while both do sport reasonable keyboards the former one’s form-factor was far from ideal. The N900, though, does have a mostly-comfortable keyboard and it even sports most of the special characters and all that one might need. It certainly beats on-screen keyboards by miles, I never once used the on-screen keyboard on my N900 and if I could have a similar sliding keyboard on my LG G2 I wouldn’t touch Swype, either.
it goes both ways, after getting competent using “swiping” as an input option there is no way I would like to go back to a phone with a physical keyboard. And I said this as a person who has used plenty of blackberries and android devices with physical keyboards.
Either case, a physical or virtual keyboard on a small/cramped device like a (mobile) phone is always going to be a subpar input experience with plenty of tradeoffs either case. Which is the point I was trying to make.
Old Nokias apparently. The keyboard on Windows 8.1 is amazing…good key spacing, predictive text and swiping…smokes everything that I have used in the past. I wish MS would bring the swipe keyboard that is on the phone to the Surface…I don’t use any other language but English, but for English, I don’t even want to type on a full size keyboard anymore…the swipe keyboard on WP8.1 makes me just lazy. The passport’s physical keyboard layout just seems awkward and awful to me.
Edited 2014-07-02 00:54 UTC
Good!
Now I can have my other hands to tap my head while I rub my tummy.
You had your time. Now go off and join oblivion with the rest of the corporate fossils that couldn’t see the writing on the wall.
We don’t want your product, nor do we want to support your product.
… either you have multiple personality disorder or you’re using the Royal “we.”
my military installation decided to keep bbs we are suppose to get the z10 soon, In fact I have had 80 new in the box sitting on the shelf for months awaiting for the new bb server to come online. WTF did they not go with android or Iphone, they are DoD approved.
It’s ugly, very, very ugly.
I know people don’t really care about the stories about switching. I have Macs, Android and other Linux devices, and more than six months ago I switched to a BlackBerry Z10, leaving my iPhone behind. Only out of curiosity. Well, I became a fan and a heavy user. BB10 is awesome and the fact that it is running on QNX makes it even more interesting, however, that doesn’t really get to the surface. The OS, especially 10.3, is great, but the design…this phone just looks too bad. It is an important factor whether they are aiming at corporate users or not.
I don’t know… I actually think it looks kinda neat. Its unique at least , and they do need to differentiate their products being they have become something of the black sheep of the industry.
But looks != design, and I actually don’t think the design is bad at all when you actually think about what this is. It is a slightly different form factor from most other phones, but Its more than just a “lets just make a honking big phone!” kind of thing like the Note. Some thought went into this I think…
This is first and foremost a phone that is designed for 2 hand use. It will be somewhat awkward to use with 1 hand, but seems to be trying to make up for it by being supremely usable with two hands using thumbs for typing/navigation. Sounds to me like they are trying to leverage the archetype blackberry design and just scaling it up to its optimal size for 2 handed use.
Makes sense to me. I don’t know if it will work or not, but at least it isn’t just a “me too” device like the Z10 (which is a great phone, but design wise there is nothing remotely interesting about it).
Initially I disliked the design, but it has grown on me.
it’s sad that a company that releases good phones with a good operating system is being willed to flop because they don’t have any “cool apps” thus aren’t in the top 3…
This phone is kind of ugly (I use a Z30), but from a user who wants a decent phone with a nice OS there is no competition.
It’s different, possibly an effective hybrid between large screen and hardware keyboard. There will be no confusing it for an iPhone, or any other iPhone-lookalike. The keyboard looks like it might be awkward to use, but that’s to be determined with a hands-on at some point.
Passport might be my next BB when I retire my Z10.