As BlackBerry Passport made its official debut on Wednesday, the device that enables mobile professionals to Work Wide generated a huge reaction among the digirati: tech journalists and bloggers, analysts and other influencers. Besides dominating the front page of tech news aggregator Techmeme, it also was a top Twitter trend in the United States and Canada.
So, what are people saying?
Analysts Praise Keyboard, Productivity Potential
CNBC tech reporter Jon Fortt liked many aspects of the device, starting with the oversized screen.
“BlackBerry’s explanation for the design makes sense: The display shows 60 characters of text at a readable size and shows enough depth in a document to get context, making it the best I’ve seen for reviewing and annotating documents,” he wrote. Fortt also thought that Android apps “ran smoothly” on the BlackBerry and that its size was a non-issue.//
“Skeptics of the shape will question how it fits in a pocket, but it slips in about as easily as its namesake, the universally pocketable passport,” Fortt said. “It will be a snug fit in skinny jeans, but this phone won’t bend in there—unlike the iPhone 6 Plus.”
In a piece for Computerworld magazine, reporter Matt Hamblen quoted several analysts, including Rob Enderle of Enderle Group, Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Lopez Research, and Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates.
Rob Enderle lauded the keyboard. “The advantage of a physical keyboard is that you can blind type, which means you can keep your eyes where they are supposed to be and with quick glances can still get that email or text sent out . . . The Passport will be a great tool for those that are still wedded to a keyboard and want a more cutting-edge phone.”
“QWERTY keyboards are highly underrated,” echoed Maribel Lopez. “While they seem old school, they’re very useful. Millennials might like the device because it could be perceived as retro cool.”
Meanwhile, Jack Gold recognized the appeal for business professionals, saying, “Passport is aimed squarely at enterprise users . . . Its unique form factor is optimized for document creation and editing, so BlackBerry is targeting really heavy Office-type users and its core messaging users. Passport . . . could give BlackBerry a boost in its enterprise installed base.”
Jack Gold separately noted that some commentators criticizing the BlackBerry Passport didn’t understand its intended business professional audience:
Principal Analyst at Reticle Research, Ross Rubin, likes the BlackBerry Passport’s “horsepower”:
“This latest handset launch shows that it’s back to business for BlackBerry – and what a smart move that is. Business handsets are where BlackBerry started, and this phone could be its Passport back from the youth messenger market – and all the bad PR that came with their love of BBM,” uSwitch analyst Rob Kerr told Mobile News in an article headlined ‘Analysts Quick to Praise BlackBerry Passport.‘ “After a year away from the UK market, a return to Blighty with a keyboard-based smartphone is a move that plays to BlackBerry’s strengths, and shows it has finally understood what people liked about its early phones.”
Meanwhile, CCS Insight chief of research Ben Wood told the Financial Times that “this is definitely a marmite product – based on our experience so far people either love the design or are a little perplexed by the size and shape.” Wood called the BlackBerry Passport “distinctive” and added that “after 18 months of disruption the strategy that new CEO John Chen has laid out seems to be taking hold. The business has stabilised and the Passport device is a critical milestone in efforts to rebuild the business.”
Another CCS analyst Shaun Collins told the BBC that the BlackBerry Passport “certainly made me respond more eloquently to emails rather than just triaging them with a ‘Yes, no, I’ll call you back or see you later’…it gives you the BlackBerry experience on steroids.”
“This is the BB10 device that BlackBerry users have been waiting for,” IDC Research analyst Ramon Llamas told CNET.
“This is really built to appeal to the business customer,” said Bloomberg Intelligence’s John Butler. The BlackBerry Passport can succeed if it captures a slice of BlackBerry’s core audience of 50 million, he added.
Journalists Call this a “Great” Phone
In a review for the Register, Andrew Orlowski writes, “The key difference of the Passport, apart from its striking shape, is that the its QWERTY keyboard doubles as a capacitive multitouch trackpad. This gives you two main advantages over the generic rectangular smartphone that aren’t immediately obvious from the pictures. Firstly, when editing text, the phone doesn’t move in your hands, and your attention doesn’t switch quite so much. Note “hands” – plural: this is a two-handed device. I particularly enjoyed being able to select and manipulate blocks of text very quickly,” he wrote.
CIO’s Lynn Greiner wrote: “Videos look great on the wider screen too, and the stereo speakers even do justice to music like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy . . . Bottom line: this is a great phone . . . [T]he functionality is solid, the feature set comprehensive, and performance strong. It definitely puts BlackBerry back in the game.”
Al Sacco, reviewing the device for CIO, digs it:
