BlackBerry Passport hands-on: 5 things you'll love and 4 things you'll hate

BlackBerry Passport hands-on: 5 things you'll love and 4 things you'll hate

BlackBerry has officially announced pricing and availability details for its new Passport smartphone, which was previously unveiled and detailed through a variety of blog posts on the company’s Inside BlackBerry blog. (Specific pricing and availability information can be found at the end of this post.)

BlackBerry Passport

I was fortunate enough to spend some time with the Passport before the announcement. The device is unlike any smartphone I’ve seen before. It’s big. It’s square. It has actual buttons—a lot of them. It’s kind of awkward. It’s definitely not for everybody.

The most unique thing about the BlackBerry Passport is its keyboard, which is both traditional/physical BlackBerry keypad and touch keyboard. It’s composed of three sets of physical buttons and up to four additional rows of on-screen touch keys. The physical buttons themselves are touch enabled so you can use a number of gestures for navigation and faster typing. (Check out the video below to see the keyboard in action.)

The Passport’s combination of touch-enabled physical buttons and on-screen keys is refreshing in a world of cookie-cutter mobile keyboards. Most importantly, it can help you get more work done on your smartphone. The thought of typing out this post on my new iPhone 6 quite literally gives me chills. The job wasn’t exactly enjoyable on the Passport, but it was better than whipping out my 15-inch laptop to write on the plane in my cramped economy seat.