Gadgetory

for years blackberry was a smart phone for getting stuff done the ideal BlackBerry user doesn't have time to mess around doesn't have time for games and definitely doesn't have time for your nonsense BlackBerry's new passport is just a smartphone for that person but for the rest of us it's one of the strangest phones on shelves today the $249 passport or $599 unlocked is what you would get if you took a classic blackberry and stretched it in all four corners making it a giant square slab of a device it weighs nearly 7 ounces measures over 5 inches tall and over 3 and a half inches wide it's actually the same size as a standard international passport it's a solid hefty device it's got a steel frame and a soft touch finish and it's wider than almost every other phone you can buy including samsung's new Galaxy Note 4 and the new Apple iPhone 6 plus the password is awkward in your hands and awkward in your pockets and I definitely dropped it once or twice in the few weeks I've been using it it's awkward dimensions are thanks to its giant square display as a 4.5 inch high-resolution IPS LCD panel with 1440 by 1440 pixels and a dense 453 PPI it looks great it's got wide viewing angles and no visible pixels and you can really see a lot on this screen it's great for reading great for navigating spreadsheets and great for plowing through email but unsurprisingly it's not great for watching video or playing most games because no matter what you do there are annoying black bars above and below whatever you're watching but if you live your life in a spreadsheet the square screen is perfect for that below the display is a three row physical keyboard it's an honest-to-goodness throwback to what blackberry is best known for it's similar to the BlackBerry keyboards of yesterday but it's not really as good because it's too wide and it's impossible to type on with one hand worse the spacebar is strangely jammed up into the last row of keys instead of below the letters like every other keyboard ever it's something I can never get used to and I'm still way faster and a good virtual keyboard I'm wondering why blackberry just didn't extend the phone another quarter inch and put in a fourth row considering the passwords already a massive phone the keyboard does have some cool tricks it's got a capacitive touch layers you can swipe on it to scroll through web pages and email and you can also use it to move the cursor around when you're typing but I found it's just easier to use the touchscreen for doing things like that the passport runs BlackBerry OS 10.3 it's been refined and tweaked and looks a whole lot nicer than it did a couple of years ago but it's still the same interface heavily reliant on swipes and gestures and it's not particularly intuitive blackberry 10 centers around widgets app icons and the hub the hub is a good it attempts to group all of your notifications in one place but it's still not as good a notification experiences Android or even iOS little things like marking a bunch of Twitter notifications as read still take way too many taps and for some reason insists on showing all of the appointments in all of my shared calendars instead of just the ones I actually want to see it's the area where BlackBerry has the most potential but it's still unfulfilled but the biggest new feature in blackberry 10.3 is a new virtual assistant it's like Siri it's like Google now it's like Cortana but it's just not as good this virtual assistant can perform web surges make calendar appointments set reminders and do more with just your voice it's intelligent and it's got good voice parsing technology but it's often slower than the options on other platforms to fix its long-standing problem of no apps blackberry is now pre loading the Amazon Appstore on the passport it's a huge step forward the Amazon store has many more apps and blackberry store ever did but it's still missing popular options like Instagram snapchat and more installing apps from the Amazon stores at raw requires multiple screens button presses and loading bars before the app is actually usable for the people that this phone is built forward the Amazon App Store provides more than enough apps but if you want to use the latest messaging app or post photos to Instagram you should probably look elsewhere the password is the most powerful hardware BlackBerry's ever put in the phone it's fast most of the time and the browser is really quick and responsive but if I try to multitask or do a lot of things at once the system definitely slows down opening the camera can take multiple seconds and sometimes it just doesn't happen at all that's pretty unacceptable for a high-end device in 2014 and certainly not one with as much RAM as the passport the cameras the best camera BlackBerry has ever used that's not really saying much it's a 13 megapixel unit with flash and autofocus and can shoot 1080p video at 30 or 60 frames per second image quality is okay it's not great but the bigger problem is it's just slow and a defaults of the passports odd square format even though you can't share any of those square photos to Instagram you can't change the passports battery but the integrated cell is really big and it lasts for a really long time there wasn't a single day where the password didn't last all day for me and many times I could go two days without plugging it in two days of getting stuff done just like blackberry intended but when everything is added up the BlackBerry password is a niche smartphone if there ever was one BlackBerry's built a phone that's a shrine to everything the company has done for the past decade and a half it's a big productivity powerhouse that's designed more for work than fun it even looks like it's wearing a suit but despite getting a number of things right the passport fails on some vs ones like the keyboard that makes no sense and it's giant awkward to use dimensions it's a perfect phone for very select few people and it's clearly the best that Blackberry can do but for the rest of us that left BlackBerry's behind years ago BlackBerry's best isn't good enough and there's nothing in the password that's going to bring us back