BlackBerry learns from experience
Passport delivers what customers are looking for
With the announcement that Apple and IBM have teamed up to provide hardware, apps and secure cloud solutions to enterprise customers, things seem a bit bleak for BlackBerry, the company that once stood tall as the trusted mobile solution for businesses.
BlackBerry recently announced it would cease involvement in consumer mobile and focus on emerging markets as well as play to its strengths in the enterprise market.
Key advantages include their enterprise level server software as well as the various security features that enterprise and government customers trust.
In terms of hardware, BlackBerry’s answer was the very large and unusual looking BlackBerry Passport.
Still an unreleased device, it was conceived for enterprise customers and designed around productivity. A large touchscreen measures 4.5 inches with a resolution of 1440x1440 pixels.
The use case for such a large display on a mobile device is so it can fit more information, such as spreadsheet columns, on a single screen.
The large screen is complemented by the biggest QWERTY keyboard on a ‘mobile’ device that makes this hybrid something like a cross between a notebook, tablet and a phone.
In a strange way, the Passport is competing with all three staples of an enterprise user’s tool box and Blackberry hopes it will be the device of choice of enterprise
It’s never a good idea to pin a company’s hopes for future success on one device. No one knows this more than BlackBerry
and business users.
As odd as it looks, the Passport seems to bring BlackBerry OS 10 to life, giving users even more to work with in a device that’s still considered mobile. What felt like a constrained user interface in last year’s flagship model, the Q10, seems to fit right at home in the Passport’s screen.
The Passport, which is expected for a September release, also comes with a surprise feature. In its bid to compete with Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now’s personal voice assistants, BlackBerry will debut its BlackBerry Assistant feature on the Passport.
What makes BlackBerry Assistant different is that it’s focused on messaging. The feature will be able to search e-mail and calendar appointments, run web and social media searches as well as perform actions such as composing and sending emails or creating calendar entries.
It’s never a good idea to pin a company’s hopes for future success on one device. No one knows this more than BlackBerry, which shipped its first BB OS 10 device, the Z10, a bit prematurely because it had already been delayed.
The issues surrounding the Z10 were the lack of applications as well as dated hardware that didn’t really grab the consumer or the business markets.
BlackBerry soon followed suit with the Q10, which was a more traditional QWERTY keyboardenabled model as well as the flagship Z30, which was the largest and most powerful device they had shipped to date.
With the BlackBerry Passport, the company formerly known as RIM, has clearly learned from previous releases and is fortifying a unique hardware experience with software and functionality it believes its customers really want.