BlackBerry's "All Business Phone" Passport And What It Tells Us About The Company's Future
While BlackBerry may be on the ropes, it hasn't lost the will to fight. Will its new smartphone slay the company's demons and revive its vanishing handset sales?
By Sadho Ram — 21 Aug 2014, 07:58 PM — Updated about 10 years ago
According to reports, BlackBerry is soon expected to release the Passport, a new model of smartphone that fuses the company's signature QWERTY keyboard, slimmed to three rows and strictly alphabetical, with an unusual 4.5-inch square display
BlackBerry's first flagship in over a year, the Passport will come with a number of unique features, and as the company claims, it "reinvents the mobile keyboard," and also acts as a trackpad
The device has been called a “phablet,” the term for a tablet-like smartphone, though it is comparatively squat. It’s best suited for the inside pocket of a jacket. Which is exactly the point. The Waterloo, Canada-based company hopes that its device will be used by the enterprise customers it lost in recent years as it failed to keep pace with rivals like Apple and Google. BlackBerry hopes that government, finance, and health care workers find the device’s unorthodox dimensions ideal for their work.
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“It’s great to see BlackBerry step outside of its comfort zone and forge its own path in terms of design,” says Ramon Llamas, an analyst for the market research firm IDC. “Passport won’t get confused with previous BlackBerry models like the Bold and Q10, and the large screen keeps BlackBerry in pace with the competition.”
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Going by the looks, it's easy to think the Passport's boxy design is just to differentiate itself from the masses of iPhones and Android phones on the market. However, there's a catch.
The device features a 4.5-inch square screen with a 1,400 x 1,400 pixel display, and a recent partnership with Amazon.com ensures a ton of Android apps will run on the device.
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But at the heart of the Passport is BlackBerry's attempt to lure back its core customer base, which has always been the enterprise sector. The display size offers a wider view of documents and the large physical Qwerty keyboard allows for easy typing. Even the Passport's name evokes a business persona. And that's a good thing. Chen has said that 80% of the company's mobile subscribers are business users.
modernreaders.comWith a pixel density of 435ppi, a brilliant Snapdragon MSM8974 processor under the hood and all manner of bells and whistles besides, the Passport ticks all the right boxes
The Passport has a stainless steel frame with a matte backing, a 4.5-inch 1440×1440 pixel LCD display, a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 3GB RAM, a 13MP camera, 2MP front-facing camera, a non-removable 3450 mAh battery, and will come pre-loaded with the Amazon Appstore running OS 10.3.0.675.
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Though the Passport could prove to be a smart move in winning back enterprise users, or at least holding on to current ones, we have to be realistic about BlackBerry's current position
Just last week IDC released its latest smartphone vendor data, and BlackBerry's struggling even more than before. In Q2 2013, the company had 2.8% worldwide smartphone market share. But in Q2 2014 that fell to just 0.5%.
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The company can't continue to experience drops like this in the worldwide market, battle Apple in the enterprise sector, and still have a fighting chance in selling lots of mobile handsets. So while the Passport shows BlackBerry is committed to its future with business users, we'll have to wait until the device launches next month to see if the feeling's mutual.
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Meanwhile, BlackBerry's CEO Chen has never predicated his turnaround strategy on a massive revival of smartphone sales
Instead he worked to turn BlackBerry Messenger, an application that continues to be a point of differentiation for the company thanks to industry-leading security and encryption for wireless text and e-mail communications, into a significant source of revenue by signing licensing deals with Android and Apple.
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Further, BlackBerry’s QNX software division—named for the operating system it acquired in 2010—is developing new technologies for the automotive and cloud-services industries. “Chen is opening BlackBerry to more ecosystem partners, which in turn adds value to the BlackBerry solution,” Llamas says.
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But that doesn’t mean Chen wouldn’t like to see BlackBerry smartphones take a new lease on life—especially now that profit margins have been greatly improved by his decision to outsource manufacturing to Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group.
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“What BlackBerry needs to do is focus the value proposition they offer to enterprise as well as their renowned security capabilities,” Lam says. “They need to win in offering the better solution to Fortune 500 companies. The hardware innovations are just the icing on the cake.” Still, how sweet it would be.
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