Are you a BlackBerry Passport? You'll probably know at first sight, because this is the most divisive phone I've seen in years. The Passport is the premier business messaging phone, and it casts aside other frivolities. Yeah, you can have a little fun, but not too much, because that's not what we're here for.

I carried a Passport around for a week and guys (yes, all guys) kept trying to take it from me. One was a TSA agent. One was a top exec at a major business outsourcing firm. One just had really big hands. As I said, if you're a Passport, you'll know.

At the time of this review, AT&T has confirmed that it will carry the Passport, though not with a price and release date. BlackBerry will be selling an unlocked unit in the U.S. through shop.blackberry.com for $599, which is reasonable for a high-end unlocked phone; iPhones, remember, start at $649. The unlocked model works well on AT&T and T-Mobile, and I tested it on AT&T. BlackBerry said they anticipate the device coming to various U.S. carriers for around $249 on contract.

Physical Features and Call Quality

The Passport is unique: As a big, blocky rectangle at 5.04 by 3.54 by 0.37 inches (HWD), it's almost the exact size and shape of a real passport. That makes room for a 4.5-inch square, 1,440-by-1,400 screen and a glorious 3.25-inch-wide QWERTY keyboard, complete with Bold-style sculpting and frets. There's no dedicated number row; numbers and symbols appear on a virtual row above the main keyboard, which I found very easy and fluid to use. The keys are very clicky and a little stiff—they take effort, but not too much. The keyboard, by the way, is also "touch-enabled;" when you stroke it up or down, it acts as a scroll wheel in the Web browser. At a honking 6.84 ounces—considerably heavier than even the massive iPhone 6 Plus—this thing has real heft.

The Passport's squarish body and edges caused all sorts of problems in my pockets. It doesn't just slip in and out—the corners get caught on the corners of pockets, even in my jacket pocket. It's also, as far as I'm concerned, always a two-handed device. When it's held in my right hand, my thumb only reaches about halfway across the screen, and repositioning it in my hand makes me feel like I'm about to drop it. Once, I did, with disastrous results.

The LCD screen is sharp at 453ppi, and has some of the best outdoor visbility I've seen on any phone. The glass 'waterfalls' down the edge, which is beautiful, but creates a major price in durability; we're down to iPhone levels now, apparently. I totally shattered a Passport screen with that single drop from waist level to concrete. Get a case.

It was refreshing to see BlackBerry pay attention to things that too many smartphone makers don't treat as top priorities any more: call quality, outdoor visibility, and battery life.

BlackBerry gave me an unlocked phone with an AT&T SIM, fully banded for the AT&T and T-Mobile networks. The phone supports LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/13/17/20, HSPA+42 on bands 1/2/4/5/8, and quad-band GSM. That means it'll work brilliantly on AT&T, T-Mobile, and foreign networks, but we're waiting on a CDMA version for Sprint and Verizon. The phone will support HD Voice on T-Mobile, but not Sprint, and the company said it's "working on" VoLTE. The phone supports the latest Wi-Fi 802.11ac with speeds on par with other top devices, along with Bluetooth 4.0 LE and NFC.

Road warriors make a lot of conference calls, and I am madly in love with the call quality here. Yes, that's even without VoLTE or HD Voice. I thought the Samsung Galaxy S5 was the gold standard—no, this is.

The secret sauce here is smart adaptation to surrounding noise. The earpiece is quieter indoors, and louder outdoors. Noise cancellation through the microphone is excellent. I also used the Passport extensively with wired headphones and a Bluetooth headset. Both were unusually good experiences: Sidetone on the wired headset was sharp enough that I could whisper and feel confident I was being heard, and I conducted an hourlong interview on a Plantronics Voyager Legend headset with no clicks, pops, or dropouts. The bottom-ported speakerphone is loud and clear.

The 3,450mAh battery isn't removable, but I'm okay with that. Taking the Passport to a trade show, I found it lasted a very long day without a problem. Subjecting it to our hardest battery test, streaming a video over LTE continuously, I got 7 hours, 48 minutes of solid streaming. That's better than any other leading smartphone. The Passport can handle your day.

Great Built-in Apps

The Passport has a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM. It runs BlackBerry OS 10.3, which looks like nothing else, but also happens to run Android apps from the Amazon App Store.

Several of our standard benchmarks either weren't available or crashed on the Passport, typical of the third-party app experience here. Geekbench, Antutu, and GFXBench all wouldn't run. But browser-based benchmarks showed the Passport to be on par with mid-to-high-end other phones in terms of performance. As you won't be running a lot of third-party apps and BlackBerry's own apps are highly optimized, everything feels smooth.

The BlackBerry experience pivots around the Hub and the Recent Apps screen. The Hub, accessible with a swipe from anywhere, is a universal inbox including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, texting, and all of your e-mail accounts. The Recent Apps screen shows up to eight thumbnails of running apps. Beyond that, there's a rearrangeable app drawer with folders.

The Hub is brilliant; all of my various forms of email (including Google!) showed up instantly. In fact, BlackBerry handles Google's two-factor authentication better than Google does. The only thing it's missing is Google's auto-sorting of spam messages into a "promotional" folder. The Recent Apps screen, to me, is a bit of a miss: I keep wanting to pin things there like widgets, but I couldn't, and so my weather would roll off the screen when I didn't load it often enough.

Notifications pop up over whatever you're doing, and you can kill them or reply to them immediately. You can batch emails for filing or deletion. Attachments look gorgeous. Nobody does business messaging like BlackBerry.

BlackBerry's Web browser has a great little touch: It tells Web sites it's a desktop copy of Firefox. Hallelujah—no second-class-citizen, "mobile Web" experiences, just Web sites. There's no Flash, but streaming embedded media worked just fine. The Passport has a desktop-class Web browsing experience.

The Passport comes with almost everything you'll need for work. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn integrate into the Hub messaging system. The Remember to-do list and note-taking app syncs with Evernote. Documents to Go, now owned by BlackBerry, works hand-in-hand with a special Adobe Reader app for excellent Microsoft Office and PDF document support.

Attach it to a BES server, and you get BlackBerry Balance, which sandboxes your work and personal data into two modes that are easy to flip between.

For PC connectivity, BlackBerry has an app called BlackBerry Blend, which will run on Windows machines, Macs, iPhones, and Android devices. Blend lets you transfer files to or from the phone, and can also give you access to sandboxed corporate data from a PC that doesn't have its own VPN access.

Next Page: So What's the Downside?

The Down Side of the BlackBerry Passport

… But No Other Apps

I'm firm on this: Only buy the BlackBerry Passport if it already does what you need it to do, because the third-party app situation here is the worst I've seen on any smartphone in years.

The Passport uses BlackBerry OS 10.3, which runs Android apps. BlackBerry loaded two app stores here: BlackBerry World, which is now specifically for business and professional apps, and the Amazon App Store, for fun stuff.

At first glance, app availability looks not too bad. Yeah, sure, there are some big brands missing (most especially any official Google services, including YouTube), but you can fulfill most of your needs, especially from Amazon's store.

Most of the apps I downloaded ran very poorly on the Passport, usually because of the high-res, square screen. I started with games. Robotek and Riptide GP are two flagship "Built for BlackBerry" games in BlackBerry World. The text in Robotek is too small to read, and the Riptide controls are screwed up. Bejeweled 2, from Amazon, just crashes. Some of my beloved Kemco RPGs refuse to load; others format strangely on the screen.

But "who plays games on their phones?" the business travelers cry. Unfortunately, business travel apps have lots of problems as well. I fly Delta Air Lines; the only Delta app available in the two stores is seriously de-featured compared with the standard Android app. Egencia, for corporate travel management? Looks like an app, but it's just a Web link. Even BlackBerry's own BlackBerry Travel has distorted graphic banners!

Like news? The Passport has a troubled relationship with third-party news apps, too. The "Built for BlackBerry" Guardian U.K. app displays all articles in a narrow column down the middle of the screen. The Feedza RSS reader has problems with the virtual keyboard overwriting visible content.

(One exception: Amazon Kindle worked well, which was a relief considering BlackBerry said ebook reading is one of the Passport's top strengths.)

BlackBerry says that developers are working on fixes for every app I sent them. But that's a lot of apps, and I'm dismayed that in every case, I was allowed to buy the app before discovering it failing. That's why I'm saying you just can't count on third-party apps for this phone.

Multimedia and Camera

The Passport comes with 24.42 of its 32GB of internal storage free, and you can also easily slip a 64GB microSD card into a slot near the top, which I did. The phone even supports the exFAT file system for cards up to 2TB, including that 512GB card SanDisk just announced.

Music sounds just marvelous. I especially appreciated the equalizer setting for Airplane, which boosted midrange sounds so that, yes, my music sounded better on an airplane. The BlackBerry Passport user spends a lot of time on airplanes.

Video playback is hampered by the form factor. Between BlackBerry's own video player and third-party players available in the two app stores, it can play pretty much any video format (including MKVs with subtitles), but the square screen doesn't lead itself to immersive video; you'll almost always have giant black bars above and below your image.

The 13-megapixel main camera is very slow. That makes it ideal for taking photos of houses for your real-estate brochure, but as for photos of your fast-moving kids—well, c'mon, when was the last time you saw your kids? Your spouse is taking those photos with an iPhone 6.

The autofocus takes up to three seconds to lock in, a crazy amount of time for a modern camera phone. Once it's locked, pictures are nearly instantaneous until you need to switch focus. HDR mode is nearly unusable, with a message popping up on the screen telling you to wait for a four-second delay while it collects images. Adding to the wait, some of my pictures didn't appear in the gallery until up to 10 seconds after I took them, making me wonder if I took them at all.

Images taken in good lighting had solid colors, but were often marred by visible sharpening effects. In anything less than excellent light, those sharpening effects get much worse; an indoor photo taken during the daytime, with light coming in through a window, dropped to a 1/20 second exposure and showed a little smearing. A true indoor shot dropped to 1/15 and looked blurry. Even the lowest light didn't push the camera below 1/15, though it pumped up the virtual ISO until there was tons of noise.

Video recording goes up to 1080p60, although it defaults to 720p. Videos taken outdoors looked washed out, but smooth. There's no HDR for video, which makes bright skies very bright indeed. Indoors videos don't have the washed-out problem, and look good up to 1080p at 30 frames per second.

The 2-megapixel front camera takes selfies that get blurry fast in anything besides great light, and consistent if somewhat noisy 720p video. In other words, it's terrific for business videoconferencing and Skype, and lousy for taking pictures in a darkened room while you're in your underwear.

The Passport supports both wired SlimPort and wireless Miracast for mirroring its screen to a TV. Both work fine, although Miracast's frame rates really suffer in crowded Wi-Fi environments.

Conclusion

So, okay. Here's a weird thing. My BlackBerry Passport review period overlapped with my iPhone 6 review period. And while I was doing the iPhone 6 review, I kept checking the Passport even though it had a cracked screen for my e-mail. I'll just put that out there.

The BlackBerry Passport is the apotheosis of the work phone. It is spectacular at the things you need to do for work: fitting in your jacket pocket, lasting all day, calling, emailing, Web browsing, editing PowerPoints, and showing them on a big screen.

It's awful for things you don't need for work: Instagramming, game playing, movie watching, taking photos of kids, fitting in pockets of tight pants. But maybe that's a feature. Maybe you aren't supposed to do those things on your work phone.

You may notice there aren't a lot of comparisons with other phones in this review. That's because the Passport doesn't really compare with other phones. Either you're a Passport or you aren't. Either you want that keyboard or you don't. Hopefully I've given you enough information to decide.

Best Mobile Phone Picks

Mobile Phone Product Comparisons

Further Reading