Most smartphones produced in 2014 will follow a certain design playbook: rectangular screen, a few buttons around the edges, and just enough thickness to house the internals and the requisite battery. One could argue that this is the idealized design for a touchscreen phone, arrived at after years of research and development and even more years of booming sales. BlackBerry would argue that all phones look like this because innovation is dead.

That's the line the company pushes in its latest blog post to promote the square-screened BlackBerry Passport, seen above. We're all "stuck in a rectangular world," it says, and while the rectangular smartphone is a "great ergonomic design that drives content, media consumption and quick communications," the shape is "perhaps limiting innovations."

The Passport's 4.5-inch, 1440×1440 display is "like the IMAX of productivity" and can display more information from spreadsheets or webpages or e-books without as much scrolling or flipping between portrait and landscape modes. Like the BlackBerry Q10, it uses a physical keyboard augmented by some onscreen keys.

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). Though BlackBerry is still losing money and its presence in the modern smartphone market is negligible, its latest financial report indicates that losses may be stabilizing.