Well then, BlackBerry, you certainly took a gamble with this one. For a company so close to the edge, you really have to admire the sheer bravado of designing a phone so radically different to everything else on the market.

Here's the problem though - it hasn't really worked. Designed for the 'mobile professional' as BlackBerry calls it, this has to be the ultimate incarnation of everything BlackBerry is about. It's for the power user, and pretty much no-one else.

The Good



Sharp screen

Fantastic battery life

Clever notifications

User interface

Square screen is pointless

Design

Hardware

Camera

User experience and apps

Entertainment

Verdict

Design

The idea of the square display on the BlackBerry Passport is simple. It's there so you can read more lines of text without having to scroll down and up.

Personally, I don't mind scrolling on a display, and would rather a phone didn't take up so much space in my pocket that its sharp corners jabbed into my leg.

The other thing is, the Passport is quite big and bulky. It's 194 grams, which is markedly more than the iPhone 6 Plus or any other phablet out there. It's also thicker at 128 x 90.3 x 9.3 mm.

That said, we can actually forgive the dimensions slightly due to the phone's fantastic battery life - but more on that later.

As for materials and build quality itself, this is a solid device that combines metals and plastics exactly as they should be. It's very nicely put together.

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Hardware and battery life

The spec sheet on the BlackBerry Passport is actually quite impressive. You get a 2.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, as well as 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage.

It's the 3450 mAh battery that we like best. BlackBerry promised 30 hours of usage between charge, and we are actually seeing something close to this. Other manufacturers need take note here.

As for the rest, you have microSD support up to 64GB, as well as a 1440 x 1440 4.5-inch square display. It might be a strange shape, but it's certainly sharp and bright. One of the best screens we've seen on a smartphone.

All these specifications are really geared towards the power user. The problem is that stuffing that sort of kit into the Passport raises the price above the £500 mark SIM free, which is a lot to ask for a device that isn't running Android or iOS.

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Camera

The Passport's camera is a 13-megapixel unit, with a 2-megapixel front facing snapper to back it up.



An LED flash handles the business of low light usage. Both are largely fine - there is nothing out of line to report here.

The major issue the camera has is speed, in that it just doesn't open that quickly. This isn't the instant snapping you get from an iPhone or Android handset, but the pictures it does capture are perfectly fine.

Really though, for a device so business-focussed, the camera just isn't that important.

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User experience and apps

Which brings us nicely onto the user experience itself. BlackBerry 10 is a little like Android Wear, in that it works in various different windows each sat above, below and to the left and right of a main home screen.

In theory, it should be a slick and simple experience, but in reality it just isn't. Take the app drawer for example, which is opened by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.

Sometimes applications will stay open, while at other times they will be closed down by booting another app. It all feels very random.

Then you have the BlackBerry Hub, obtained by swiping to the left of the screen. This is our favourite part of the Passport equation, and works wonders for the power user.

Being able to see all your emails, Facebook, Twitter and other notifications in one place, as well as respond to them, is very useful indeed.



Couple this with the battery life and you have a phone that you can pretty much run a business from, which is what the phone is intended for.

The problem is, that you can do just the same from an iPhone or Android handset and likely with a nicer user experience. Their batteries might run out earlier, though.

The keyboard is both the Passport's biggest strength and its biggest weakness. It uses three lines of physical keys with a touchpad below it.

You can scroll up and down on BlackBerry 10 using the keyboard itself, which is a great way around covering the square display with your finger.

A top line of the keyboard will appear dynamically on the bottom of the Passport's screen depending on context, making suggestions on what the device thinks you might want to type.

This works well, as does the typing experience itself. What we don't understand is that, given the size of the device already, why not just extend the physical keyboard down lower?

It would mean you could get the same rapid typing experience that power users - precisely the people who use a BlackBerry - would like.

It's still better to type on than most devices, but we don't really see why BlackBerry didn't make for a full QWERTY keyboard.



Other features, like BlackBerry Blend, which let you view data on multiple devices, are again useful for power users who fancy doing a bit of work from home.

Lastly, let's talk about apps. The device uses Amazon's App Store, which is basically loaded with Android applications. It does actually open the door to a large number of apps way beyond what BlackBerry users could normally expect.

It's still not as strong as a standard Android or iOS app store, but you've got a lot to play with.

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Entertainment

As you might expect, watching movies on a square screen doesn't really work. At all.

However, the speakers in the Passport are loud and sound great. Better even than the HTC One. We imagine this is so they can be used for decent conference calls, but playing music is nice enough too.

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Verdict

So then, the BlackBerry Passport. First up, we have to say, hats off to BlackBerry for trying something different. Right now, the company needs some sort of success in the devices space - but sadly, this isn't likely to be it.

Even so, no other smartphone developer has tried anything even close to this ambitious, and experimentation is what technology should be all about.

If you are someone who needs to know they can access emails whenever and wherever they are, the battery life alone makes this the handset of choice for you.

If, however, you are considering the Passport as a return to BlackBerry after moving to iPhone or Android, don't, as the user experience just isn't there yet.

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