Things may be looking food for BlackBerry this quarter as its smartphone passport sold out just hours after going on sale online last Wednesday. According to BlackBerry CEO John Chen during an earnings call last Friday, a total of 200,000 back orders are still in queue.
In an article from Forbes, the Blackberry Passport is the company’s answer to the ongoing ‘phablet’ craze. It is stated there that it was designed like the name it possess and its dubbed as “the universal symbol of mobility”
BlackBerry claims that the Passport which is 4.5 inches wide and has a physical QWERTY keyboard, has a better resolution than their rivals Apple and Samsung. “The BlackBerry Passport was created to drive productivity and to break through the sea of rectangular-screen, all-touch devices,” BlackBerry chairman and CEO John Chen said in a statement.
During the reveal of the BlackBerry Passport at the Canadian phone maker's worldwide launch event in Toronto, Chen described their new product as ‘iconic’.
The BlackBerry Passport sports a Gorilla Glass casing for better protection and has a wide screen with a 1440 x 1440 resolution for sharper visuals. The keyboard is touch-enabled, so users will be able to ‘flick up’ on the keys and mimic predictive typing introduced on the touch-screen Z10. With this kind of keyboard, typing out documents are made easier and typos are reduced by around 74 per cent.
"A lot of people when they first see this device... usually people look at it and say it looks a little different than expected. So I immediately pull out the passport and they realize it's the same size," said Chen. "It's a size that can fit in a gentleman's pocket... and a lady's purse." he added
As he continued he shared how he and his team came up with such a product. “I've been here 10 months and we recruited a team, inside and outside the company, and we laid out quickly a few things: a financial strategy, a technical strategy...and a distribution strategy," he said.
Chen foresees profit for BlackBerry by mid-year of 2015. "You can see a progressively good trend going forward," Chen said.
