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The reviews are in: BlackBerry Passport is odd, but a gift to the core BlackBerry fan

iPhone and Android users may be loyal to their brands, but there doesn't seem to be any technology fanbase quite as devout as the BlackBerry user. In the face of financial troubles, a short-term CEO and an ever-diminishing slice of the smartphone marketshare, BlackBerry fans remain true to their handset of choice.

Today, their patience has paid off. At an event in Waterloo, Ontario today, BlackBerry (with the help of Wayne Gretzky) launched its latest smartphone, the BlackBerry Passport. The square-screened device, offering a wide screen and physical keyboard, which doubles as a touch pad, is the first new device since BlackBerry launched the Z30 last October.

[ Yahoo Finance: BlackBerry Passport signals a deliberately different company ]

We took a look at what reviewers around the 'net are saying about the new BlackBerry Passport, and here are some of the highlights and lowlights of the new device:

The Wall Street Journal:

[I]f this were a romantic comedy, the new BlackBerry Passport would be the struggling company's big "Say Anything" gesture to win me back, along with the rest of its once-devoted fans. Unlike its failed BlackBerry 10 phones, aimed misguidedly at everyday consumers, the Passport...is focused squarely on what it is calling the "power professional."

...But beneath it all it wants to serve the same purpose every BlackBerry has for the past decade...The Passport has some neat tricks and longer battery life than the competition, but it's living in the past. It's not 2005 anymore.

Crackberry:

BlackBerry has obviously done some testing here to figure things out. You don't just toss out this radical, quirky design without at least looking at the data on it all and now that I've been using the BlackBerry Passport for a while, I really can't see myself going back to a different BlackBerry smartphone. I love my BlackBerry Z30, the battery life is great, the display is large, the camera is above acceptable, but the Passport blows it out of the water for me.

...I highly encourage you to not dismiss the device without actually giving it a real go. The BlackBerry Passport really is a productivity machine. I found myself responding to emails more, loading up full web pages more, more willing to complete tasks that I'd normally wait to get back to a computer to complete.

The Verge:

All its size and weight does make the Passport feel sturdy. Its stainless steel frame and matte plastic construction are durable and functional, if not exciting. Even though I dropped it more than once, my review unit still looks like it just came out of the box.

It’s a very purpose-built screen for doing business-y things like reviewing spreadsheets and slide presentations. But that makes it not very good at many of the other things that we use our smartphones for today. It’s much easier to navigate a spreadsheet or browse a webpage with the Passport, but reading my Twitter feed requires a lot of scrolling, and videos have annoying black bars eating up half of the display above and below the content.

For all that BlackBerry has done to make the Passport a productivity tool, its design felt like it was fighting me more often than it was helping me. Between the awkward dimensions and odd keyboard layout, I never felt comfortable with the Passport in my hands and never felt comfortable getting work done on it.

CNET:

It is an odd-looking phone, sporting a shape we haven't seen in some time -- the HTC ChaCha and Acer BeTouch E210 are two devices that attempted the full-QWERTY, square-display look, to ill effect. But the Passport, by contrast, looks really sharp. It feels like a premium item, with a sturdy stainless-steel frame that screams "jet-setter." And yes, it fits in my pocket.

Reaching up to the screen to insert numbers and punctuation or capitalize letters took some getting used to, and the spacebar is a little narrow for my taste, but it didn't take very long to get acclimated. And BlackBerry has built in quite a few really smart features and gestures to give its keyboard an edge.

The bottom line for the BlackBerry Passport, based on the response from the people who have spent some time with it, is that it is a device built for work and productivity, and one that will hold up to wear and tear well. However, its size and shape are undeniably strange, and can be cumbersome to use, especially for those unaccustomed to it.

But for those who are die-hard BlackBerry fans, I'm sure it'll be just peachy.

(Photo courtesy The Canadian Press)

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