BlackBerry Passport With 4.5-Inch Square Display Launched at Rs. 49,990

Soon after announcing the BlackBerry Passport smartphone at simultaneous events in Toronto, Dubai, and London last week, the company has launched the handset in India. The BlackBerry Passport has been priced at Rs. 49,990 and will be available starting October 10.

BlackBerry Passport will be available to pre-order starting Monday on Amazon India. Consumers who will pre-book the smartphone at Amazon India will receive an Amazon gift card worth Rs. 5,000 and 5000 miles from Jet Airways. The Passport smartphone will be also available for pre-booking at BlackBerry stores.

The BlackBerry Passport is the first phone in the company's lineup to come with the new BlackBerry 10.3 OS onboard, which brings such features as BlackBerry Assistant, and a brand new BlackBerry Hub with Instant Actions. With BlackBerry 10.3, users also get access to the Amazon Appstore for Android and roughly 240,000 apps.

The biggest feature of the smartphone, apart from its 4.5-inch 1440x1440 pixel resolution IPS LCD display (translating to a pixel density of 453ppi), it the three-line hardware keyboard with capacitive touch sensitivity. This allows users to perform gestures, select auto-complete suggestions, and scroll across lists. Notably, depending on the type of page being viewed, additional lines of keyboard show up on on screen, such as auto-complete, or a legend to the numeric keyboard.

The BlackBerry Passport features a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor with Adreno 330 GPU; 3GB of RAM; 32GB of inbuilt storage that's expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB); a 13-megapixel rear OIS camera with a BSI sensor; a 2-megapixel front camera, and a 3450mAh battery that is said to deliver up to 30 hours of mixed-use battery life.

The BlackBerry Passport measures 128x90.1x9.3mm, and features a Nano-SIM card slot. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, Micro-USB + Micro-HDMI via SlimPort, USB OTG, NFC, GPS, DLNA, Glonass, GPRS/ EDGE, 3G, and 4G LTE.

Apart from India, BlackBerry plans to launch the Passport smartphone in 29 other countries through its carrier and distributor partners before the end of the year including Saudi Arabia and the other parts of the Middle East, Singapore, Austria, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, Venezuela, Philippines, Russia Slovakia, Spain, Romania, and Colombia.