Live from the BlackBerry Passport launch in Toronto
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 8:41AM 
By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
We're on hand the the big BlackBerry Passport launch event in Toronto where CEO John Chen has been spotted and is likely going to take the stage in a few minutes. The location is Real Sports bar and they're currently playing some dramatic music while streaming tweets on various screens stating how awesome the new Passport is going to be. Looks like we will be getting the 'bigger picture' soon, we're 15 minutes away from the keynote. Hit jump for our coverage of the event.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen took to the stage to discuss BlackBerry, he mentioned that the company's restructuring was complete and that they're ready for a comeback. Chen had time to poke fun at the iPhone 6 while daring anyone to try and bend their new device. He's also taken potshots at the Samsung Galaxy S5, no mention of Windows Phone, though which you would think is a better target for the company that's now 4th in mobile market share.
Chen then brought out hockey icon Wayne Gretzky to discuss his early experiences with the BlackBerry Passport as well as his belief in a good Canadian comeback story. The message was clear, BlackBerry wants to win back Canadians with this new device.
A demo showed the BlackBerry Passport going screen to screen against the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S5. The point of the demo was that the screen of the Passport is better for viewing and consumption and that the keyboard is innovative plus it is fast and accurate. The new keyboard doubles as as touchpad. You can scroll up and down one the keys, side to side as well. The predictive keyboard also guesses various possible words, you swipe up on the keyboard below the word you want and it floats up on screen.
They also demoed BlackBerry Assistant, a new voice assistant that's native to BlackBerry 10.3. Early demos of the voice assistant is that it has a slightly robotic. They actually did a side-by-side test and while BlackBerry Assistant managed to pull both work and personal appointments (Siri picking up only personal ones), the quality of the voice was noticeably different. Siri sounds more natural.
The BlackBerry Passport's speaker is supposed to be 18 per cent louder than the HTC One M8, 350 per cent louder than the Galaxy S5. They say that they speaker was designed to be louder and clearer plus it also has a carefully placed microphone that dynamically adjusts both volume and tone of the call. They are calling this Natural Sound Technology.
Specs for the BlackBerry Passport are pretty impressive. It has a recent 2.2GHz quad core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage as well as slots for a nanoSIM and microSD expansion for up to 128GB. There's also a 13 megapixel camera which BlackBerry says is the best they've shipped, there are various OS tweaks to the camera as well.
One of the biggest announcements was BlackBerry Blend, a functionality based on software installed on your Mac, PC, iPad or Android tablet that forwards BBM or text messages from the phone to your PC or tablet. You can also save files from your computer or tablet to BlackBerry Blend so they are accessible on any device connected to BlackBerry Blend – even when you don’t have your phone with you. This is potentially huge for accessing corporate intranets and also for better calendar management.
We'll be back later once we've had a chance to get some demo time with the Passport.
Reader Comments (1)
I have the blackberry 9900 and i absolutly hate the app world, i love the phone tho, i also have an iPad mini and the apps on there are amazng much better that blackberrys so with the relese of the Balckberry Passport i would like to know what the app world will be like and will they be similar to iOS 8 or Android.