I’m reading a lot of chatter on tech blogs and websites at the moment about the new BlackBerry Passport, most specifically about its ‘innovative’ touch friendly keyboard.

The idea behind the keyboard is that, as well as being able to type quickly and easily as is the way with all of BlackBerry’s excellent physical keyboards, you can also use it as a touch-sensitive mouse, sliding your fingers around over the top of the capacitive keys in order to navigate your way around the screen.

It’s an excellent idea and certainly a vast improvement on earlier BlackBerry devices that ultimately coined the phrase BlackBerry Thumb.

But, apart from the new screen seemingly designed to be perfect for Instagram photographs, it’s not exactly new.

The picture below is of an official Sony peripheral for my PlayStation 3 controller – a keyboard that speeds up the process of entering data in to the multitudinous forms that often have to be completed in the PlayStation Store and other locations. Its keyboard is also capacitive, allowing you to control the cursor on the screen in the same way as I do the one on my laptop.

The only thing that boggles me about BlackBerry’s new keyboard is why it’s taken them, or any other mobile phone or keyboard supplier for that matter, so long to actually copy it!