BlackBerry's Innovation: Square-Screened Smartphones

EthanV2 sends word that BlackBerry, having finally caught up to a world dominated by smartphones, is now trying to push the envelope by developing a smartphone with a square screen. The BlackBerry Passport has a 4.5-inch screen with a resolution of 1440x1440. The phone has a physical keyboard as well. In a blog post about the new phone, they show a picture with it side-by-side with an iPhone and a Galaxy S5 — the Passport is slightly taller than the iPhone, and significantly wider, as you'd expect. The Passport is a play for BlackBerry's "traditional" work-oriented user base, where the earlier BlackBerry Z10 and Z30 were efforts to break into the post-iPhone consumer smartphone space. Though the Passport may well be preferable for spreadsheets and word processing, that square screen will be much less useful for widescreen movies, and its wide, blocky design will entirely prohibit one-handed use. The Passport is expected to appear later this year, and it will launch with BlackBerry 10.3 (at least, according to early hands-on previews).

Comments

It's like we've learned nothing in 5000 years

[Overzeetop]

1.25-1.5:1 How hard is that? We've got centuries of experience in making page sizes for reading and viewing, and most of them fall into that range. Unless you're Hasselblad, ditch the square. If you're not a television, please don't use 16:9.

#getoffmylawn

Que the outrage

[Maxwell]

Complaints of "no one is innovating anymore" followed closely by "look at BB, stupids, phones HAVE to be one handed and pocketable! No innovation allowed!"

Me? I kind of like it. I use two hands anyway so why not make a true two handed device?

Re:Que the outrage

[Maxwell]

And BB were always fat and square before the Bold models got slimmer. This is like the true successor to the click wheel line.

Re:Que the outrage

[taxman_10m]

Blackberry should make a killer android phone with qwerty slider.

Re:1440 wide vs 1080 wide

[Defenestrar]

No no no - the pixels aren't the same because the Blackberry has true square pixels - which is the best, and the Samsung has the narrow rectangular pixels which aren't very good for spreadsheets or other business applications.