Passport stuck inside the Blackberry square

IS the BlackBerry Passport a masterstroke by an ­ailing company? Or is it a square peg in a round hole?

IS the square-shaped BlackBerry Passport a masterstroke by an ­ailing company? Or is it a square peg in the round hole of modern technology?

You’ve got to feel sympathy for BlackBerry. In 2009-10, the then Research in Motion raked in $US14.95 billion in revenue and had a subscriber base of 41 million. Now it’s struggling. There’s mass lay-offs, with revenue falling 64 per cent last year.

So does the Passport represent, to borrow from Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, an ability of a smartphone species to adapt to change?

The odd square shape of the Passport may have some benefits. It will get noticed among the array of phones in suburban telco shops. It’s different. And the wider display lets you see more of web pages and documents without scrolling rightward.

Given the IPS LCD display’s 453 pixels-per-inch resolution, text is sharp, and the screen is bright and inviting. Turn the phone on its side, and its hard keyboard becomes a trackpad and scroller, offering control when scrolling up and down a web page. It’s clever but you can of course scroll using the touch screen.

But most people don’t get their information from scrolling traditional web pages on phones any more; it’s funnelled to them through apps and social networks in a format that suits their device. Citing web page scrolling as a defining feature is a big risk.

While the screen will be noticed in shops, so will the device’s old fashioned stainless steel frame, its weight (50 per cent heavier than iPhone 6) and its width when tucking it into pockets.

Another myth is that enterprise users — the likely customers — won’t care that 4:3 or 16:9 video fills about half the square display with black bars at the top and bottom. A big phone with smallish video.

Maybe BlackBerry believes business people have two phones and will watch their video on a different device. But competitive smartphones nowadays cater for both business and recreational use. You do everything on one device.

The same applies to photos. Would you want to show off your family photos to your friends on a square screen?

Beyond its odd shape, the Passport has decent specs. It’s BlackBerry’s first quad-core phone, and it has 3 gigabytes of memory, and 32GB of internal storage, which can be expanded by 128GB using a microSD card.

It uses a Nano SIM as the iPhone does, works on an array of 4G networks and makes use of dual band WiFi networks. It has a decent 13-megapixel 4128x3096 pixel back-facing camera and a 2MP fixed-focus frontwards shooter. BlackBerry includes editing options for photos such as cropping, light adjustments, filters and frames.

While you remove a small backplate across the top to insert the SIM and microSD card, the battery however is fixed. But at 3450 milliampere hours, this shouldn’t be an issue as battery life is excellent. BlackBerry claims up to 12 hours video playback. In our test we obtained almost 11 hours.

The Passport’s three-row keyboard is BlackBerry’s signature feature and this should be good news for two-finger typists.

But most people now hold their phones in one hand and prod away with the other. Personally, I’m not so quick with two fingers, but I type with greater accuracy.

Old BlackBerry users will notice there are only three rows of keys on the hard keyboard, not four as on previous models. That’s because extra keys are shown on the screen just above in a virtual fourth row.

Scrolling downward on the hard keys brings up another three rows of numeric keys and special characters on the display. It’s the first time I’ve seen a keyboard with both hard and soft keys working together. This may irk some traditional BlackBerry keyboard users. On the other hand, it worked OK for me.

BlackBerry includes useful predictive text, which throws up three words as you type. Instead of prodding the word, you gently flick upward to the word you want from the hard keyboard, but I found this gesture hard to master.

And that’s the problem. Much thought and care has gone into developing the keyboard, gestures, shortcuts, and there’s the well-­organised BlackBerry Hub for mail and notifications.

But that means a steep learning curve for most consumers. You do have the option of voice dictation.

I wasn’t too impressed with some of the Passport’s performance. Device start-up from scratch was about 53 seconds compared to 33 with the iPhone 6.

And BlackBerry assistant, the company’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Google Now and Microsoft Cortana, also was slow.

I usually ask phone personal assistants John Howard’s old citizenship test question about Sir Donald Bradman. Siri at least replies with a Wikipedia entry, Black­Berry assistant simply throws up a completed web search of Bradman.

One feature I really liked is BlackBerry Blend, virtualisation software that you run on a desktop, Mac, or tablet. It means you can securely read and reply to mails, or send BlackBerry messages and SMSs, on a chosen device, and when you’re finished and disconnect, nothing is left there. It has a clear, attractive interface.

Finally, BlackBerry has found a way around having too few apps. You still download BlackBerry apps from BlackBerry World. But you also now download Android apps from Amazon’s Appstore.

Android and BlackBerry apps sit side-by-side in your app drawer and BlackBerry says the Android ones run in their own individual secure software wrapper.

Using Amazon and avoiding Google Play lets BlackBerry avoid the gravitational pull of Google’s data-hungry ecosystem.

The Amazon App store has more than 240,000 Android apps and having your favourite app there is a matter of its developer lodging it with Amazon. But before buying a Passport you should check that the apps you depend on are available.

The Passport uses BlackBerry’s latest 10.3 operating system. All this again begs the question of why BlackBerry simply doesn’t go ­Android and offer its flagship ­security features through a virtualised, sealed-off part of the handset, as Samsung does with its Knox app.

BlackBerry’s reported answer is that such a system would undermine security and cannot be done. The company has been outspoken in the US on what it believes is ­security shortcomings in Knox.

But in June it was reported that the US Pentagon had approved five Samsung devices with Knox for use by 600,000 mobile users, 470,000 of which use now-discontinued BlackBerry devices. So there is no bar to BlackBerry producing an Android device.

It’s beneath the surface that passport exhibits the detail, love and care BlackBerry puts into its smartphones. But that awkward square shape, the almost retro stainless steel casing, and the unfamiliar operating system will work against it.

It may get noticed in telco shops, but I fear it will be akin to 15 seconds of fame.

Many people, including me, want BlackBerry and Microsoft/Nokia to succeed in a smartphone market dominated by two players, Apple and Samsung. The more diversity, the better.

But to succeed, BlackBerry needs to think outside the square, and not from within it.

The device will sell mid to late next month through Optus Business. Pre-orders start tomorrow.

Final Australian pricing is yet to be released but in the US it costs $US599 ($687).

Price: $US599 or contract (Australian pricing yet to be announced)
Rating: 5/10