New Delhi: Canadian handset maker BlackBerry has launched its new Passport smartphone in India, at Rs 49,990. The Passport smartphone will initially be available on Amazon.in and BlackBerry exclusive stores from today till October 10 and afterward in other retail stores.
The company also launched pre-booking offers such as a Rs 5,000 worth of gift card from Amazon for future purchases and 5,000 additional JPMiles for frequent flyers of Jet Airways.
The Passport, as the name suggests, has the shape and size of a real passport, as it is ideally designed for enterprise users on the move. However, this odd-shaped device has a purpose. Work first, play later.
The device comes with a 4.5-inch touchscreen that has an aspect ratio of 1:1 with a resolution of 1440 x 1440 pixels. On this display, users can see 60 characters per line, which is far higher than the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Apple iPhone 6, where you can see only 28 and 33 characters per line respectively.
Just below the display, there is an innovative touch enabled keyboard that combines a physical keypad with virtual keypad functions seamlessly. This means a user can flick to type or slide along the keys to move the cursor, or scroll web pages.
The device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 2.2GHz Quad-Core processor. It also has a 32GB of flash memory that's expandable up to 128GB through the micro SD Slot and 3GB of RAM. It features a Nano-SIM card slot.
Passport runs on BlackBerry 10.3 OS, which helps support features such as BlackBerry Assistant that enables management of email, contacts, calendar and other features through voice and text commands.
The device comes with a 13 megapixel auto-focus camera with 1080p HD video recording at 60fps and a 2MP fixed-focus front camera. The handset is fueled by a 3450mAH integrated non-removable battery, which BlackBerry claims gives up to 30 hours of battery life in mixed usage.
However, the new device is bulky at 194 grams and also thicker at 128 x 90.3 x 9.3 mm.
Connectivity options include Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, Micro-USB + Micro-HDMI via SlimPort, USB OTG, NFC, GPS, DLNA, Glonass, GPRS/ EDGE, 3G, and 4G LTE.
The BlackBerry Passport runs the new BlackBerry 10.3 OS onboard, which brings such features as BlackBerry Assistant, and a brand new BlackBerry Hub with Instant Actions. Blackberry Hub consolidates all of your tweets, Facebook messages, text messages, email, voicemail and so on into the one place for easy viewing. With BlackBerry 10.3, users also get access to the Amazon Appstore for Android and roughly 240,000 apps.
An interesting attraction for many business people for accessing Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents is the "Docs To Go" feature. BlackBerry believes this will allow more data to be seen on the screen at any one time than any other smartphone.
Also useful is the Blend software, which allows users to access their phone's main features on a desktop or laptop computer, even if they left their phone at home. This means if you have received a text or email on your phone, you can answer it with Blend on a laptop. Blend can also be used to browse files and web pages on your company's internal network.
"With its unique design and innovative features, the BlackBerry Passport is a testament to our continued focus on innovation and productivity, specifically to strengthen our enterprise segment offerings," Sunil Lalvani, Managing Director, BlackBerry India, said at the launch.
Overall, the BlackBerry Passport appears to be a compelling option for enterprise users as it has everything from previous BlackBerry 10 devices and even more. The Passport has some neat tricks and longer battery life than the competition; however, the form factor can repel few users.
BlackBerry has increasingly lost relevance as a smartphone company in the years since the 2007 launch of Apple iPhone and the 2008 introduction of Google-powered Android phones. The once-iconic company is now determined to win back market share under John Chen, who took over as the Chief executive last year.
