My experience with the BlackBerry Passport (and a review)
So I've been using the BlackBerry Passport quite heavily for a little over a week now and wanted to post my thoughts about it... (warning: this post is a little bit long).
First of all, a little background as to what led to this: until recently, I've been using a BlackBerry Classic and have really enjoyed it. However, my girlfriend was in need of a replacement for her BlackBerry Q5 and she mentioned that she was interested a Classic... I gave mine to her seeing as it's in practically new condition, fully tested and unlocked, and bringing her own device saves her $20/month on her bill. Got it all set up for her and she really likes it by the way.
In doing this however, I was left with a decision to make... do I purchase another Classic? The Passport has always been a little tempting for me... oh decisions, decisions...
I had a few concerns, mostly related to the size of it and the different keyboard layout. Those concerns had stopped me from buying the Passport when I had originally purchased the Classic, but I kept being drawn to the way that the Passport looks and the improved hardware specifications that it offered. Temptation finally overcame me and I said why not?
The first thing I did after taking it out of the box and charging the battery was update to OS 10.3.2.680. Even though this is a carrier locked device, I tend to follow the release schedule for unlocked devices and seeing as this release has been deemed "official" for the Passport I didn't bother waiting for it to be pushed OTA.
Since the keyboard is one of the Passport's most touted features, I'll start the review portion of this post off with that:
The touch sensitive keyboard is an interesting development, and in my opinion it's one of the most innovative things that the phone industry has seen for a while. The combination of a physical keyboard that allows for greater accuracy combined with touch gestures, such as swiping to complete words, scrolling and zooming, swiping back to delete words, etc. is AWESOME!
Now with the above having been said, the keyboard layout does take a little bit of getting used to if you're coming from a traditional BlackBerry keyboard, but the learning curve wasn't nearly as steep as I thought it would be - the biggest change was actually the different position of the space bar, and after getting accustomed to the layout I can type on the Passport just as accurately and as fast as I could with the Classic, dare I say more so because of the larger keys and the ability to complete words with swipe gestures.
The screen is excellent, with accurate color reproduction and it's extremely bright. Absolutely no problems reading what is on the display when in direct sunlight or anything like that, which is nice compared to some of the Samsung Galaxy devices I've owned in the past that would become nearly unusable. In addition, the 1440x1440 screen resolution is quite nice for browsing the Web, reading email, etc. I find its a lot more comfortable compared to smaller devices where you wind up scrolling and zooming a lot.
Battery life is fantastic and I'm able to power through hours of really heavy usage without putting a dent in battery life. I've never been able to pull this off on another device, even with something like the Galaxy Note where I could run the battery flat in a couple of hours with heavy multitasking. With a more typical and average workload where the screen isn't on for hours at a time, I can easily get two or three days out of this.
Performance is excellent as well. As many of you already likely know, the Passport is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU and backed by 3 GB of RAM. You can multi-task to your hearts desire with this phone and it never skips a beat, even when using Android apps.
The camera works well - I've gotten some pretty good shots with it, no complaints there. The Passport has a 13 MP camera with optical image stabilization, and it's certainly better than the camera on the Classic and older BlackBerry 10 devices.
Call quality is as you'd come to expect from a BlackBerry, audio is loud and clear, and the speakers are excellent in my opinion.
All in all, I'm VERY happy with my BlackBerry Passport, I'm glad that I decided to pull the trigger and give it a chance... to anyone thinking about buying one, go for it! This is by far the best mobile device I've owned to date... in fact it's so been such a great experience that I've barely touched my computer since last week. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.