Phone Arena has a short video up in which the BlackBerry Passport gets introduced. The unique hardware keyboard whose entire surface is also a touchpad gets demonstrated.
Typical of a BlackBerry, the Passport employs a portrait style QWERTY keyboard. However, this time around, they’ve minimized the layout by shrinking the row of buttons to a mere 3 – as opposed to the 4 we’re normally accustomed to seeing. Additionally, numbers and punctuations aren’t available through the keyboard, but they’ve been turned into virtual keys that sit above the top row for quick access. And during our demo, we got the chance to see the keyboard be used to scroll through web pages by lightly brushing your finger over the QWERTY.
This has been a long time coming: innovation in the hardware keyboard space. Currently, there are effectively no decent high-end smartphones with hardware keyboards, and that’s a shame. I’m glad BlackBerry has the guts to go against the grain here and try to breath new life into this severely neglected form factor.
They are trying to create a line of phones that look different than the regular smartphone. They are hoping people will just buy the product because it looks different.
People do buy things because they look different. Just not a lot of people.
I’m guessing that blackberry will try any idea to get a decent foothold in the smartphone market. Just doing a “look, we can also do what the other guys are doing” isn’t going to cut it (unless you have a bottomless treasure chest), so they’ll need to stand out a bit.
Not everyone likes OSKs, and not just old people.
ps3 keypad did something very similar with the keyboard.
http://youtu.be/TYBQwjNYpBk?t=4m10s
The keyboard also acted as a trackpad.
Love the keyboard and form factor. I wish that I could get this with iOS or Android.
I doubt that iOS is optimized for physical keyboard input.
I don’t think Android would run smoothly on the 1:1 aspect ratio of the devices screen.
But lets see BB10 OS has Android support so it is possible to see if the Android apps run well on this form factor.
I prefer BB10 OS as it is the better OS in my opinion.
A good multitasking and the superb BlackBerry Hub aswell as the good integration of online services in the OS (Dropbox, Box.net in the filemanager for example)
My comment was more wishful thinking than anything else. I wouldn’t use Android apps on BB10 if I owned a Blackberry. I’d rather use applications that are optimised for the native platform experience.
Unfortunately, professionally it wouldn’t make sense for me to use BB10 on my main phone. It really should either be iOS or Android since I build applications for these platforms.
I completely agree, I have a Porsche-Design P’9982. I bought it after I returned the iPhone 5s that I got. I never owned an iPhone and since that everyone I know has and loves theirs I figured I would give it a shot. Wasn’t for me, the lack of a file-manager was to much for me to continue using it, that and I really didn’t like that I couldn’t select the browser of my choosing as a default (didn’t Microsoft get in trouble for not including other browsers in Windows, so why not Apple) couldn’t see my local directory when I plugged it into my Surface 3, multitasking or the lack of was very frustrating, I like to listen to YouTube for new music but when I navigated away from the app it would stop playing, the HDMI dongle was not only expensive but pretty much useless as most apps couldn’t display 1080p and again you couldn’t navigate away from the app that was being used to display the video (I’m sure this has something to do with only having 1GB of memory, plus.it gives the illusion of a smooth interface when everything except for a few Apple apps that are alowed to run in the background) , the list go’s on and on. Frankly I don’t get why people like them, the amount of limitations is absolutely staggering when compared to Android 4.4.4 or BB 10.2. The screen was also way to tiny for my taste.
Blackberry OS is pretty sweat, not only do I absolutely love the BB Hub but the file manager is just terrific. I can not only access my local files with ease but mounting all of my cloud storage within a single app is something that I simply do not ever want to live without, it’s so useful. I can simply click on one of the 400 movies I have in Google Drive for instance and the OS then opens the media player to start streaming. Another thing that iOSs doesn’t allow you to do. Also the phone has a built in HDMI out and I love, love this feature. Though the phone also supports DLNA and Miracast again two other features the iPhone doesn’t support. So watching movies on my TV or projector couldn’t be easier. Though the app selection isn’t as large as what the others provide, Android apps work just fine, at least the ones I’m interested in. Overall the Porsche-Design phone was a good purchase, though I like premium products I’m sure anyone who buys the current BB Z30 would be very satisfied. So I will defiantly grab a Passport when it’s released and will continue supporting BlackBerry as long as they keep up all of the hard work.
This is a phone created deliberately to be used dual handed most of the time (as opposed to IPhone which was and still is highly optimized for one handed use, thus stuck in 4 inches).
It tries to exploit most good outcomes of that including
1440x1440px res that actually beats FHD on most important factor for nonvideo content consumption (horizontal res) by a healthy margin.
All in all this device should be a killer for web browsing ,email, documents on the go, etc, although nonstandard aspect ratio will make a lot of non optimized apps struggle.
If that mode catches on it will give a birth of a new form factor and can affect Phablet market strongly.
Edited 2014-07-31 09:42 UTC
Woah, wait, what? Really? That sounds really cool. :O
My Nokia N900 died this week. It’ll be a few weeks before I receive my Jolla mobile, but I already miss the physical keyboard of the N900.
Sad times!
I still consider the N900 the best OS on a smart phone. MeeGo was good on the N9, but without that hardware keyboard, kind of lost a lot of it’s awesome for me. I just wish Nokia had continued with Maemo.
I’m looking into bluetooth keyboards. Maybe even that “other half” sliding keyboard that snaps onto the Jolla that someone made.
I finally sold my N900 a few weeks ago in a bout of cleaning house and getting rid of unused electronics. Now I wish I’d held onto it a bit longer, I could have sent it your way.
Thank you! I think it’s time for me to move on. And I bet whoever bought it will love it as much as I did. Who else would buy a five year old smart phone?
Wow! Didn’t know they were still in business…:-)
So hardware has the tactile advantage and keys are always in the same place
Software has the advantage that you can adjust it to circumstances (number input), languages (Japanese), only takes up space when you use it. And it seems easier to use it for swiping and autocompleting input.
This machine seems to try and benefit from the combination of hardware (3 rows) and software (1 row) but I don’t think it is doing a great job at that. Only the “left/middle/right swype up for autocomplete” seemed somewhat interesting but too limited. Swyping on the keyboard instead of the screen seems pretty useless
Even for big typers the 3 rows seem to low. when you are holding the device on those bottom 3 rows your hands will soon get tired from preventing the top of the device from tilting backwards
It is good to see that Full-HD (16:9) is now on so many devices. Now that that barrier has been broken it is interesting to see that there is experimentation with non-16:9 devices again. I don’t think 1:1 is it though.
(I also submitted a short article about the digital assistant that BlackBerry is introducing, but that never got posted. Hopefully we will see BlackBerry do something that will catch on, but I don’t think this piece of hardware or their current software is going to get them any significant marketshare)
I personally have never thought that having full HD on a phone or tablet device was important. If I want to watch a movie I’d rather do so on a large screen in my theatre room. On mobile devices I spend more time reading, and 9:16 (portrait orientation) just feels too cramped horizontally. That’s the main reason why I constantly use my iPad Mini while my Nexus 7 collects dust.
Edited 2014-08-01 01:11 UTC
Full-HD is not important on a phone (Iphone 5s only has 1136 x 640). But if you have it on a phablet or tablet it is nice. The most important thing is that it became a sort of baseline that everyone tried to reach and now did. I am sure we are going to see even higher resolutions but also more diverse resolutions.
And EVERYONE would rather watch movies in their theater room, but sometimes you are visiting a friend or travelling and that theater room just doesn’t fit in your pocket.
I thought the phone looked a bit weird at first, but I actually quite like it.
It’s really cool how you cans wipe up the physical keyboard to select words, scroll etc.
I wondered if it looked too big to fit comfortably in a pocket, but in comparison to the guys hand, I don’t think that’ll be an issue.
I’m quite a fan of BB10 now, I’ve had a Z30 since January, it’s the only OS I have truly liked since maemo on my N900, the hub is just perfect.
I really hope BB recover, they make nice phones and have an OS that actually works properly.
but a bit wide.
Not every one has an arse as wide as a yank, therefore not everyone’s back pocket will be big enough for it
Why do you think we’re building Mc Donalds and KFC on every street corner in your country? If everyone is as large as us, we won’t have to feel as bad about ourselves. Plus, then you’ll have pockets big enough for blackberries, the giant Luminas, and require a monster American Made SUV to haul your fat arse around.
The American way, coming your town 2015. Come on, you know you want to. It tastes like Love.
I miss Android phones with real keyboards.