BlackBerry Passport With 4.5-inch Square Display And BB OS 10.3 Announced

BlackBerry has officially announced the company’s latest smartphone – BlackBerry Passport at an initial price tag of $599 (price is of unlocked version in US). The BlackBerry Passport will be available through ShopBlackBerry.com for customers in Canada, France, Germany, UK and US immediately just after the launch. It costs CAD 699 in Canada, EUR 649 in France & Germany and GBP 529 in the UK. It comes in Black & White colour and comes pre-loaded with Amazon-App Store for Android and roughly 2,40,000 Apps.

It is available from Wednesday on a 2-year contract with Canada’s Telus for CAD 200 as a introductory offer till October 1 and after that it will be available at a price tag of CAD 250. In addition to this, with a 2-year contract with AT&T in U.S., it cost US$250.

In an event, BlackBerry also announced that, it would bring the Passport to more than 30 countries through carrier and distributor partners before the end of the year, it includes India, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, Singapore, Austria, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, Venezuela, Philippines, Russia Slovakia, Spain, Romania and Columbia.

On the specifications front, it features 4.5-inch diagonal display with a resolution of 1440 x 1440 pixels at a pixel density of 453ppi and the screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It is powered by 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 MSM8974-AA processor which is paired with Adreno 330 GPU at 450MHz and 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM at 800MHz. It runs on BlackBerry OS 10.3 with new BlackBerry Assistant and has 32GB in-built memory which can be expanded further up to 64GB via microSD card.

It is the first smartphone from BlackBerry that comes with new BlackBerry 10.3 OS onboard with all new BlackBerry Assistant and a Brand New BlackBerry Hub with Instant Actions. With BlackBerry 10.3, users get access to Amazon AppStore for Android and roughly 2,40,000 apps. The BlackBerry Assistant has been specifically designed for work and it can access both work & personal information with enterprise level security. The company says that, a revamped interface is available to meet the needs of the mobile professional.

On the imaging front, it features 13MP auto-focus rear-camera with 6DOF OIS, BSI sensor and LED flash. It has 2MP fixed-focus front-facing camera with video & image stabilisation. The rear-camera capable of recording 1080p videos at 60fps and front-camera capable of recording 720p HD videos.

It measures 128 x 90.1 x 93mm and features Nano-SIM card slot.

It packs 3450mAh integrated non-removable battery which offers up to 30hours of mixed-use battery life and has connectivity features like 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, SlimPort, NFC, GPS + GLONASS.

BlackBerry also mentioned that, it has superior call quality, as a microphone built into the earpiece and it detects ambient noise to deliver tone and volume-correct audio. The BlackBerry keyboard also  gets an update and now it comes with touch enabled keys right above, on-screen.

BlackBerry Passport Specification