Blackberry introduces a phone model with an unusual screen shape

Blackberry always tried to stand out from the crowd, even more so nowadays when the Canadian firm has been struggling to compete with the dominating by Apple and Samsung. The company came up with the idea that squares are better than rectangles and introduced their new handset called the Passport. Blackberry stated “Many have thought that creativity around the design of smartphones was dead,” adding that “the rectangle has become a de facto approach to smartphone design, perhaps limiting innovations”. It cannot be said that the phone is remarkable because its features or its price, but because the company addressed it to its most loyal customers. 

The Blackberry Passport has a 4.5 inches square screen with full HD capabilities, which is twice as wide as the iPhone 5S screen. While most rectangular smartphones show 40 characters per line, the Blackberry Passport shows 60 characters on each line. Because of this, it is ideal for reading e-books, viewing medical charts or browsing the Internet. Moreover, the square screen solves the problem of switching from portrait to landscape when taking a photo or filming. Besides the unusual screen, the phone comes with the Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, an Adreno 330 GPU, 3 GB of RAM and a 13 MP rear-facing camera. The keyboard is not a full one, omitting several popular keys like shift and caps. The company created the keyboard in this way to make the writing more efficient and increase its speed.

The phone is already available in South Africa, but it will only be released in the UK in September. Blackberry did not announce how much the device will cost but it suggested that it will be positioned towards businesses rather than average consumers. The device is considered to be the ticket to Blackberry’s revival, but many critics stated that the phone will not be a success given its ugly shape. On the other hand, the company relies on its loyal customers such as architects, mortgage brokers, doctors, real estate agents or writers, who do not represent the typical smartphone user.