The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever”

Specs at a glance: BlackBerry Passport
Screen	1440 x 1440 pixels, 4.5 inches (493 ppi) AMOLED
OS	BlackBerry 10.3 (with Android compatibility)
CPU	2.26 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801
RAM	3GB
GPU	Adreno 330
Storage	32 GB internal, with microSD support up to 128 GB
Networking	Wi-Fi 802.11ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0 LE
Cellular Bands	D-LTE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 17, 20 (2100/1900/1800/1700/850/2600/900/700/700/800 MHz) HSPA+ 1, 2, 4, 5/6, 8 (2100/1900/1700/850/900 MHz) Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Ports	Micro USB 2.0, headphones
Camera	13MP rear camera with OIS and LED flash, 2MP front camera
Size	5.04" × 3.56" × 0.36" (128 x 90.3 x 9.3mm)
Weight	6.91 oz. (196g)
Battery	3220 mAh
Starting price	$599 unlocked (AT&T exclusive contract pricing still pending)
Other perks	NFC, FM radio, Miracast direct media streaming to Roku and Wi-Fi wireless charging, voice commands, BlackBerry Blend integration with computers, iOS and Android tablets.

“That is the worst designed thing, like ever.” That's exactly what my 13-year-old daughter said as she gazed upon the BlackBerry Passport, freshly unboxed upon my desk. She picked it up, ran fingers across the keys, and put it down again. She acted as if she mistakenly touched something she found on the sidewalk, right down to taking a step back in retreat.

If BlackBerry had been out to design a phone for the teen demographic, her assessment would have been dead on. The Passport is not designed for a tiny little purse or jeans back pocket. It is designed for people who are dead center in the cult of BlackBerry—business types who want a phone that is a workspace, those who crave the tactile feedback of actual keys. There must be a bunch of those people out there, since the Passport has been difficult to find since its release in September. It sold out fast, and that was mostly through BlackBerry and Amazon—AT&T, the exclusive carrier for Passport in the US, hasn't even put the phone on its Web store yet.

Because of the Passport's unique position in the smartphone market, it’s only fair to review the Passport as a business tool—not in comparison to the latest Lollipop thing or iPhone Whatever+ as a consumer device. So rather than doing the usual feature-by-feature crawl, we put the Passport through the paces of several typical Ars 18-hour workdays to focus on its business acumen. And while we ran some basic benchmarks and explored its features, this focus was mostly on its security features. We even did some packet sniffing to see what could be seen.

When viewed in the right light, the Passport ends up looking pretty. It was unexpectedly the best smartphone we've ever used from the perspective of taking care of business. Yes, it benchmarks somewhat below phones in its price range on the tests that would run in the BlackBerry 10 OS. And there’s still a significant “app gap” between the Passport and competing devices. But that's all background noise when you use the Passport as it’s intended—as an information and communications machine, designed for people who still live and die by the e-mail inbox rather than iMessages and Hangouts and Snapchats.

On the other hand, when viewed in the harsh, unforgiving light of the smartphone market in general, the Passport is a decidedly niche-y device with features and performance that trail the current generation. The interface is quirky in places. The “apps” support for BlackBerry OS 10 from many service providers seems halfhearted (largely because of its market share we assume). Plus, there are compromises made to make BlackBerry 10 OS friendly to the Apple and Android ecosystems; these features feel a little awkward.

And speaking of feeling awkward, there's the form factor, which defies users to figure out how to properly hold it. ("It feels like my hand is being stretched," my wife said, holding the Passport. "It's like one of those hand exercisers.")

But do you want to spend your workweek with a phone that's pretty and powerful, a social media and gaming machine? Or would you rather spend it with a device that will help you always be closing? If it’s the latter, the Passport wins. Leave the fun stuff for your tablet—which the Passport will play well with when it comes time to get some work done again.

The problem with all this, of course, is that only a select few people in the world carry a corporate-issued phone anymore or keep separate phones for work and personal use. The business power tools Passport packs are great for pairing it with a personal tablet or PC, but that's probably not enough to pull anyone back to the BlackBerry platform outside of industries where they're told they have to.

Old school, updated

Full disclosure, of sorts: I am probably the one Ars editor who falls into the BlackBerry demographic. I’ve been an enterprise BlackBerry user in the past, dating back to the late 1990s when Research In Motion’s first pager-shaped BlackBerry (remember pagers?) was the Next Big Thing. Tech-maven Robert Scoble could not be physically separated from his. (At the time, Scoble was a co-worker of mine and not yet a video-blogging gadfly—and I don’t believe he ever took his BlackBerry in the shower.) I carried my own personal BlackBerry phones until around 2010.

That said, I haven't used a BlackBerry device day-to-day since buying an iPhone 3GS. I’ve never used a BlackBerry OS 10 device other than in a quick hands-on-someone-else’s situation. So we're going to cover some ground that more recent BlackBerry users will likely complain is old news.

The Passport’s appearance is jarring to people who’ve lived comfortably in the Apple/Android womb for a while. It's thicker, wider, and heavier than most current-generation cell phones—and the 3.56-inch width is what really makes it stand out from the crowd. About a fifth of its 5.04-inch height is taken up by its three-row keyboard, and the balance is largely consumed by its perfectly square 4.5-inch display.

(I didn’t see why people complained about the size of the Passport. My daughter said, “It’s because you have giant hands. That could be Hagrid’s cell phone.”)

The keyboard is both less and more than what BlackBerry users have become accustomed to. It offers fewer physical keys—just the letters of the alphabet, a backspace key, and a space bar inhabit its shrunken QWERTY layout. But when the keyboard’s in use, additional “soft” keys for punctuation, symbols, and numbers appear as an extra row on the bottom of the giant square touchscreen. The initial selection of those is based on context.

The keyboard itself is a capacitive touch device as well. In most cases, your thumbs never have to leave the keyboard to handle moving around and editing text. In other places, the keyboard becomes a scroll wheel for skimming through webpages, or it pops up alternative mapping for symbols and punctuation so you don’t have to navigate all the possible soft-key combinations with the touchscreen. And, apologies to more online emotion-savvy readers, there are no emoji maps—you’ll have to settle for old-school emoticons.

As a phone, the Passport does best in hands-free mode or speakerphone. It boasts multiple microphones and noise reduction, so it's great for throwing down in the middle of a table to do a conference call. But its odd geometry will make it a challenge for some people to use as a normal handset. It's essentially the same problem brought up by most "phablets."

The Passport display’s shape was not optimized for watching Netflix. That’s fine—good luck finding Netflix, Hulu Plus, or pretty much any streaming video app other than YouTube that will run on Passport anyway. With 1440 x 1440 pixels, the Passport has more than double the number of pixels on the iPhone 6—and the same number as the 5.5 inch screen of the iPhone 6+, with greater pixel-per-inch density. That makes it a very readable screen. It was much better than a personal iPhone 5s for tasks like skimming Wall Street Journal stories and crushing through the latest batch of 50 e-mails. Less eye burn, more getting stuff done.

Just why is the Passport thicker and heavier than other phones? The mass of the phone has a lot to do with getting things done as well. The heft is largely the result of its 3450 mAh battery. That’s nearly double the capacity of the iPhone 6’s battery, and it showed in the phone’s performance during testing. The Passport would last beyond two days on a single charge—all with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth activated and including a number of hours remotely tethered to the phone over Wi-Fi to test some of its most enterprise-friendly features. And even after all that, it took about an hour of streaming YouTube videos to draw the phone down to its last seven percent of charge.