New Delhi, September 30 – Many have said that BlackBerry is a company in the doldrums, but the Canadian firm would like to believe that the reports of its impending death are vastly exaggerated.
On Monday, at a press event in New Delhi, it showed its latest product, the Blackberry Passport. Sunil Lalvani, its MD for India went out of his way to emphasise that the company was doing good.
Even the Passport, on paper at least, was different from the smartphone launches we have seen in recent memory. It combines the old with the new. It is a throwback to the designs of Pearl and the Bold, devices from the era when BlackBerry dominated the smartphone world.
But at the same time, it is a completely different animal with all the niceties you expect in a modern smartphone. We tried the phone for a bit, read on for our first impressions.
The new BlackBerry is almost a perfect square and owes its name and shape to an international Passport. Flaunting a pin-sharp 4.5-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1450 x 1450 pixels, the screen of the Passport appears to be bigger than it really is.
It is because it does not have a 16:9 aspect ratio of a iPhone, but rather has a 1:1 ratio, which according BlackBerry is better for productivity apps like an Office suite or for emailing.
No doubt, the screen is gorgeous and the aspect ratio helps in creating and editing documents. The device also has a new QWERTY keyboard on the phone. This is not any QWERTY keyboard as the it incorporates capacitive touch technology and hence, it can be used to scroll web pages and control the cursor.
We feel the keyboard has good tactile feedback but is also a little cramped, considering it is crammed in three rows. Also, we found switching between numerals and alphabets to be uncomfortable as the numerals are displayed in the form of software keys while the alphabets have physical keys.
Due to the design of the phone, one handed usage is almost impossible. The main issue is width. We also think videos and apps will not scale properly due to the aspect ratio and there will be black bars on YouTube videos.
Build wise, the phone felt bulbous, though we found it to be very well put together. It felt solid and BlackBerry drove home the fact that it there was a steel frame inside which will make the phone sturdy and very difficult to bend.
The phone packs a lot of firepower and has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core CPU, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot and a gargantuan 3,450mAh battery.
There is also a 13-megapixel camera with optical image stabilisation on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front. All these specs are in line with what one gets on the best Android smartphones in the market.
The phone also is the first to run BB OS 10.3 which adds a Siri like assistant on the OS. Compared to Siri or Google Now, in the demo we found it to be slow, but this could be a network issue.
At Rs 49,990, it is also an expensive product and BlackBerry is asking the consumer to choose the Passport over many great Android smartphones and of course the iPhone. Does it make sense?
Perhaps considering the support for Android apps via the Amazon apps store and BlackBerry’s legendary enterprise security functionality. However, the Passport remains an unproven product. If you are thinking of buying it, wait for our review of the device. We will have more to say about the Passport in the coming days.
-INDIA TODAY
