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BlackBerry Passport: the phone for squares

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Great job, BlackBerry, keep making phones that no one is going to buy. That's exactly what you need when you're constantly losing market share.

/sarcasm
 
My first impression when I saw this last week was, this is incredibly stupid looking...

But maybe it's not the worst idea in the world. There are still Blackberry fans, even if they've moved on. And many of them still want physical keyboards. Blackberry gave them the Q10. But people have moved on because they want bigger screens for all their cool apps. They gave us the Z10, but apparently nobody wants a Blackberry phone without a keyboard either.

And so we have the merging of a big screen from the Z10 and the keyboard from the Q10 into a device the size of a phablet, with a large screen (though not quite phablet sized) and a physical keyboard.

This will be a niche device for sure, but maybe it'll do better than the last year's attempts.

Though I think Blackberry should still not give up on the non-keyboard phones. There was a lot of room for improvement on the Z10 and Z30. I think the Z10 was more bezel than display. The Z10 was almost as big as a Nexus with only a 4.2 inch 720p display. Then the Z30 comes out, more display than bezel this time, but still only 720p on a 5 inch display, kinda laughable in late 2013. The processor was a bit underwhelming too.

Not sure why Blackberry hasn't built a phone that has hardware more comparable with modern Android offering. One of it's selling points is the ability to run Android apps. If they'd just build a piece of hardware impressive enough it might bring over some Android fans to check it out.

BB OS 10 needs to work too. It's ugly. What is with the square boxes around all the icons, that looks really retro and I don't think retro was the look they were aiming for. Fortunately I see in a BB OS 10.3 preview video those boxes are finally gone, that does help it look less dated. Though it's funny how the really flat look seems to be going out of style on Android and Android L is going to bring a bit more definition and life to the UI again. Meanwhile BB OS 10.3 seems to be two years behind the trend and is looking very flat and bland.
 
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senseamp said:
What's with all the hate? They are trying an interesting form factor. Could be a good one for some people.
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Because when you're bleeding customers, you need to make devices that appeal to more than just "some people", they need more and more people to care about them. I don't want BlackBerry to fail as more competition is always better for us consumers but they are not making it easy to root for them when they keep doing stuff like this.
 
zerocool84 said:
Because when you're bleeding customers, you need to make devices that appeal to more than just "some people", they need more and more people to care about them. I don't want BlackBerry to fail as more competition is always better for us consumers but they are not making it easy to root for them when they keep doing stuff like this.
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Psh.. Didn't you hear? Everyone else uses toys, BB users are doing real work. Does that sound like a company that doesn't want to alienate potential customers?
 
zerocool84 said:
Because when you're bleeding customers, you need to make devices that appeal to more than just "some people", they need more and more people to care about them. I don't want BlackBerry to fail as more competition is always better for us consumers but they are not making it easy to root for them when they keep doing stuff like this.
Click to expand...
Let's be honest, BB hasn't been competition for at least 5 years. The market wouldn't change of they were gone.
 
Kneedragger said:
Did one of you guys write this article? Haha

http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/now-time-swap-phone-blackberry/#!bikHCl
Click to expand...

That was painful to read, but I somehow got through it. He thinks it's a bad idea to go from an iPhone to Blackberry, manages to fill several paragraphs of rants about Blackberry without managing to give a single reason why Blackberry is a bad choice. And I imagine there are plenty of valid reasons why one shouldn't, but he couldn't even manage that. All he could do was mention he knew someone that had a Blackberry Bold (a pre BB10 phone that is 3 to 6 years old) and hated it.
 
Ravynmagi said:
That was painful to read, but I somehow got through it. He thinks it's a bad idea to go from an iPhone to Blackberry, manages to fill several paragraphs of rants about Blackberry without managing to give a single reason why Blackberry is a bad choice. And I imagine there are plenty of valid reasons why one shouldn't, but he couldn't even manage that. All he could do was mention he knew someone that had a Blackberry Bold (a pre BB10 phone that is 3 to 6 years old) and hated it.
Click to expand...

Yeah I felt the same. Even though the blog title has opinion in it his reasons are a bit off. Comparing it to a Horse is a bit too much..
 
Seems it will come with Snapdragon 801 and a big 3450mAh battery. So the battery life on it should be exceptional. I'm sure people using blackberries will appreciate it 🙂
 
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