Phones Considering the BlackBerry Passport

[ucfgrad93]

The green one looks fantastic.

 

[sartrekid]

The Passport may have a convenient size on paper, but with its thickness and weight it is one clunky phone and it is terribly unergonomic when you try to hold it with one hand, such as during a phone call. Due to the short ‘chin’ on which the keyboard sits, you will have to hold it in a particular way while typing. This is the kind of phone you really should hold in your hands for a bit before you commit to it.

Wow, KALLT, thank you for your insightful response! I truly appreciate your input.

I had been thinking about this a bit. I know that BlackBerry is likely - if the rumors are anything to go by - to release an Android-run device. To be honest, I'm actually not that interested in that as opposed to the Passport. My initial excitement had more to do with experiencing an entirely new OS. When I learned about the compromises, I was at first relieved to find out about the availability of Android apps, then a bit "meh" (due to what had been reported here and pretty much confirmed in detail by you) about the fact that the Passport didn't quite fit my requirements unless I made use of that "extra layer - Android" in order to be able to do what I do with a phone in a day-to-day scenario, hence ruling it out as a potential daily-driver. The compromises are too many and it'd probably feel like buying a Mac and then running my apps mainly inside a VM. That's why I didn't insist on purchasing a BB right away because I needed an immediate "hassle-free" replacement for my daily driver.

The BB Passport is still on my list though, if BlackBerry doesn't discard its own OS and are committed to developing and investing in it further. I really want to try their native OS.

If they do switch entirely to Android, however, then the appeal will be significantly smaller to get one.

 

[KALLT]

To be honest, I'm actually not that interested in that as opposed to the Passport. My initial excitement had more to do with experiencing an entirely new OS.

BlackBerry 10 itself is actually a super nice OS and it’s a shame considering the circumstances. When I first used it after years of iOS, I noticed a lot of similarities. The home screen with the fixed raster of icons, the apps with tab bars and action bars. But BlackBerry has really done some incredible work on improving that basic experience where Apple has not.

• The home screen has a section for currently running but minimised apps that can show some basic information while they are in this state.
• They fused email, messages and notification centre into one app – the Hub – which is a really neat way of viewing all your messages and notifications at once, in one chronological list with the option to categorise items per app. The best thing about it is that you never leave it while you’re using it, because a notification will open within a dedicated part of the app and you can respond to your notification just as if you’re using the app itself.
• Within apps they allow developers to add more than 5 tabs to the bottom and the OS will simply put an overflow sidebar to the left side that lets you jump to these additional menus. They do the same with actions on the right side that can overflow in a sidebar, allowing developers to add a lot more actions thereby making apps more powerful. BlackBerry 10 also has context menus that similarly slide in from the right.
• Application-specific settings are within a menu that can be accessed by swiping from the top within the app, you don’t ever have to go into the settings app or look for a separate settings menu within the app.
• They purposely moved all the actions to the bottom (instead of the top like in iOS) and right-hand side so that you can easily reach them when you hold your phone with one hand. Together with the added gestures the system just has a really nice flow while being structurally similar to iOS, just with piecemeal improvements where they make sense. It’s in many ways an evolution of the Cocoa Touch model.

But the lack of native apps and the bandaid that is the Android Runtime just really take the fun out of the system. You will be stuck with stock apps and although they are quite powerful, they sometimes don’t cut it.

 

[sartrekid]

@KALLT, thank you for further describing the UE of BB's OS. It does sound intriguing and I like the hub idea. I had seen the feature in some YouTube videos and it looked really handy and quite the time-saver. Hmm... I do understand about the drawbacks of the OS if it is to serve as an all-rounder, but when used as a business phone, the hub feature alone sounds like a killer-feature if you want a quick and comprehensive overview of messages, regardless of media platform.

Hmmm...