BlackBerry Passport Square-Shaped Smartphone Pre-Registration Begins

BlackBerry is leaving no stone unturned ahead of the global release of its new flagship smartphone, the Passport. The company on Thursday opened pre-registrations for the square-shaped Passport smartphone.

The Canadian firm announced the commencement of pre-registrations of the smartphone on its official blog post and said, "Starting today [Thursday], you can pre-register to receive emails about BlackBerry Passport availability and other upcoming BlackBerry products and services."

The dedicated pre-registration page is now live, and interested consumers can sign-up to get more details about the soon-to-be-launched BlackBerry Passport smartphone.

At the company's earnings report and annual meeting in June, BlackBerry's CEO John Chen had confirmed that the square-shaped 'Windermere' smartphone would be officially called BlackBerry Passport and will launch in September. However, the company is yet to reveal the complete specifications of the BlackBerry Passport smartphone.

Based on a BlackBerry developer listing, the Passport smartphone will be based on BlackBerry 10.3 OS, and sport a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 1440x1440 pixels - translating to a pixel density of 453ppi.

The company recently also expressed its motivation behind a square-shaped phone, detailing the benefits for the BlackBerry Passport's design. It had said the BlackBerry Passport was "designed from the ground up for the working professional in mind," and gave several advantageous use cases for the smartphone (architects looking at blueprints, doctors looking at X-ray reports, and stock brokers navigating a Web-based trading platform).

Other rumoured specifications of the BlackBerry Passport include 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 3450mAh battery.

Last month, BlackBerry joined the league of Apple (Siri), Google (Google Now), and Microsoft (Cortana) with the unveiling of its own voice-based virtual assistant, the BlackBerry Assistant.

The Canadian company revealed that the new voice-based virtual assistant would debut first on the BlackBerry Passport smartphone and will be a part of the upcoming BlackBerry 10.3 OS.