BlackBerry has announced a brand new smartphone: the BlackBerry Passport. It’s equipped with a square screen (protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3) and has a physical QWERTY keyboard. Each key has a touch-sensitive surface, which means the keyboard can also be used in a similar way to a trackpad.
The new phone will run version 10.3 of the BlackBerry OS and is available now, priced SIM-free at £529.00 incl. VAT.
Specifications include a 4.5-inch square screen (1440 x 1440 pixels), a 3450 mAh battery, an intelligent virtual assistant, a quad-core 2.2GHz processor, a 13 megapixel camera and 32GB of memory.
John Chen, Blackberry’s Executive Chairman and CEO, said “As we set out to design BlackBerry Passport, we were guided by a simple yet challenging idea – to set aside the limitations of traditional design and to instead simply build a device that fundamentally changes the way business professionals get work done on their smartphone. The BlackBerry Passport was created to drive productivity and to break through the sea of rectangular-screen, all-touch devices.”
As well as being preloaded with the Amazon Appstore, the BlackBerry Passport will be compatible with a new productivity service called BlackBerry Blend. This enables BlackBerry users to use Windows, Apple and Android devices to access information from their smartphone, including messages (email, BBM and SMS), documents, calendar and contacts.