Bucket Tech: Blackberry Passport

Surprisingly, the Canadian manufacturer is still around and hasn't filed for bankruptcy, whats even more surprising is that they're still allowed to make phones but the biggest surprise of them all is that their latest offering is actually quite good, in fact its more than good as it matches and beats most of the top smart phones in the market right now. The only problem with it is that it looks like a freaken tile!

It's called the Passport, because its the same size and shape as a passport in Canada/ USA. It adopts touch screen functionality and Blackbery's trust worthy QWERTY keyboard that made the brand so famous in the early 2000's. This phone is being marked as a turning point for the company as it is aimed at up class business people who need something versatile and smart enough to do things that you can only do on a PC, such as multi page spreadsheets, etc. But we've heard that before from the company, their Z10 (which I have) supposed to be the device that turned things around for them but with it having to use data and not their RIM server which incorporated BIS, people were not too keen and opted for other brands

Now I know what you're thinking, its a Blackbery and it's bound to give you endless shit after 1 year and that damn clock of death will show up sometime in its life span but here's the thing. After the success with the ranges of chat phones, they didn't really do much to improve on it but after the knock they took, they did have to reinvent the wheel. Although the Z10 didn't prove to be the market changer they had hoped it to be, it became the platform to develop from. The Z10 gave birth to BB10 OS which I must admit had it's flaws at first but after the last few updates, the OS is practically faultless. The Passport comes with the latest OS 10.3 which is custom made for the Passport. 

I said the phone matches and in some cases is better than some of the phones offered on the market today, how? Well to start of with, its running a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip set which is the best on the market with a Quad-core 2.26GHz Krait 400 CPU with 3 gigs of ram! Basically you're sitting with the V12 of processing plants when it comes to hand held devices. With this much ram and processing speeds, there shouldn't be a reason for the phone to run slow at all, even with bloatware. 

Memory wise, it has on board 32gig with MicroSD up to 128gig. The Passport comes with a 13 mega pixel primary camera with auto focus and optical image stabilizer. If the camera is anything like the Z10, its bound to be great. Secondary front facing camera is 2 mega pixel, again not bad. 

Cosmetic wise, the phone looks weird, the 4.5 inch square screen with the keyboard below is a first.. It will take a while to get used to a square phone but functionality wise, what is has on paper makes it a game changing phone for the company. Whether people will take to it is another story, the company already has so much bad reputation but like Apple there are some BB loyalist and some of the old users might get drawn back because of the keyboard but for me they're still playing catch up. In terms of quality of product, I think its great but in terms of things like apps for the phone, they going to need to do a lot of convincing to developers to make them create their app for Blackberry devices. It will be interesting to see how this one does as it really is a great phone but how the market will react to it remains to be seen.