The BlackBerry Passport is now on general release in the UK, and available to buy through the firm's website and exclusively from Selfridges for a SIM-free price of £529.

It will also be available to buy via Carphone Warehouse from Friday, and through Vodafone's enterprise arm in due course.

The much-hyped device was unveiled earlier today at the Canadian phone maker's worldwide launch event in Toronto.

The event was presided over by BlackBerry CEO John Chen, and marked the official introduction of the device whose large square shaped looks, coupled with its 4.5in screen and physical QWERTY keyboard, have turned heads in the tech world since news of the Passport first broke in July.

The firm has been through the wringer in recent years, having seen its mobile market share eaten up by the likes of Samsung and Apple, and its finances have suffered as a result.

During the event, Chen hinted that the company's past troubles are now behind it, ahead of its next set of financial results being released later this week.

"I've been here 10 months and we recruited a team, inside and outside the company, and we laid out quickly a few things: a financial strategy, a technical strategy...and a distribution strategy," he said.

"You will see the company making good progress in repairing all balance sheet items..."

"It's a size that can fit in a gentleman's pocket... and a lady's purse."

The company also used the event to treat attendees to a thorough walk through of some of the standout features of Blackberry 10.3, the operating system featured on the BlackBerry Passport.

The device costs $599 to buy SIM-free in the US.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Chen told the publication the company has deliberately kept the cost of it low to drive up interest in the BlackBerry Passport, before admitting it should realistically set users back around $700 when they buy it. "I figure that to try to get the market interested, we’re going to start a little lower than that."

Specs

The experimental design comes as BlackBerry continues to seek a form factor to pair its well-designed physical keyboards with a large screen. Current generation devices, such as the Q10 and Q5, have screens which are limited to 3ins in size and while the Z10 has a 4in+ display, it is touch-only.
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Think of the BlackBerry Passport as a phablet with a physical Qwerty keyboard.
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So what can we expect in terms of specifications?

Display

The Passport is set to include a 4.5in screen with a 1440 x 1440 resolution. This helps to give it a mammoth pixel density of 453ppi. To put this in context, it should be sharper than existing flagship devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 (432ppi) and the Apple iPhone 5s (326ppi).

It also sports Gorilla Glass to offer users better protection.











To this end, the company claims users will be able to fit 60 characters on each line they write on the device, compared to the 30 offered on competing devices.

Touch-enabled keyboard

BlackBerry has cut down the keyboard to three rows. The physical keys are for letters input alone. Punctuation, numbers and even the ALT key have been given the chop and will appear on-screen depending on the context. It will be interesting to see how this works in practice.

The keyboard is touch-enabled too, so users will be able to ‘flick up’ on the keys and mimic predictive typing introduced on the touch-screen Z10.

And - while competing devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 - will have much of their screen obscured by an onscreen keyboard, Passport users won't.









Performance

The Passport will run the BB 10.3 operating system. It will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM, specifications which are comparable to phablets in Samsung's Galaxy Note range.

Internal memory is shaping up to be 32GB with space to expand this with a micro SD card slot (up to 64GB).

Battery life

The Passport packs a large 3450mAh battery life, and BlackBerry is touting a battery life of around 30 hours for power users that browse the web, take calls and access multimedia content using the device.

Apps

Blackberry has confirmed that Passport and BlackBerry 10.3 users will have access to software offered by the Amazon App Store, to broaden the range of services at their fingertips.

The company claims this means users should have access to "hundreds of thousands" of additional apps, including consumer offerings such as Minecraft, Pinterest and Cut The Rope 2.

Meanwhile, they'll also be given the chance to download one free, paid-for app from the Amazon App Store every day for free.

This will be in addition to those offered through the BlackBerry World app store.


Read more: http://www.itpro.co.uk/mobile/22612/blackberry-passport-uk-release-date-pricing-confirmed#ixzz3EQuuDjMg

$599?

This is really cool; Blackberry trying so hard to reclaim their lost market share