Unlocked BlackBerry Passport available for $599, company announces many new features

BlackBerry has officially announced its new flagship smartphone, the BlackBerry Passport on Wednesday, September 24 at three simultaneous events held in Toronto, London and Dubai. The device is available unlocked for $599 just as BlackBerry CEO John Chen had said earlier this week.

The BlackBerry Passport (unlocked) is available through ShopBlackBerry.com in Canada, US, UK, Germany, France soon after the launch at ”special introductory rates”. You can get the handset in Canada for $699, in UK for £529, in US for $599 and in Germany and France for €649. You can also buy the unlocked device through Amazon.com but the retailer has not announced its price yet.

Canada’s Telus is offering the BlackBerry Passport at an introductory price of $200 until October 1 after which it will be available at the regular rate of $250. The exclusive carrier for US will be AT&T. BlackBerry announced that the handset will be available in over 30 countries by the end of the year. These include Canada, US, UK, France, India, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia, Switzerland, Russia, Spain, Romania, Saudi Arabia and the other parts of the Middle East, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Mexico, Venezuela, Slovakia, and Colombia.

Special features of the BlackBerry Passport include:

• The innovative touch-enabled Keyboard


• Massive 3,450 mAh battery with 30 hours battery life


• Big square 4.5-inch 1440 x1440 resolution screen


• Natural Sound technology that gives high audio and call quality


• The new BlackBerry 10.3 OS that comes with the BlackBerry Assistant


• BlackBerry Hub with Instant Action feature that allows users to perform actions such as deleting a file or managing the inbox just by tapping the related icon etc.


• Two appstores preloaded – BlackBerry World and Amazon Appstore and users will get 1 free Android app everyday out of thousands of Android apps giving them access to games such as Minecraft, Temple Run 2, Candy Crush Saga, Cut the Rope 2 and Pinterest. The BlackBerry OS 10.3 update will enable users of other BlackBerry 10 devices to download this too.

Other features of the Blackberry Passport include 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 CPU and Adreno 330 GPU, 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage expandable up to 128GB via microSD card, a Nano-SIM card slot, a 13MP rear OIS camera and a 2MP front-facing camera. The dimensions of BlackBerry Passport are 128×90.1×9.3mm and its connectivity options include 3G, 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Micro-USB + Micro-HDMI via SlimPort, USB OTG, NFC, GPS, GPRS/ EDGE, DLNA, Glonass.

Unlocked BlackBerry Passport available for $599, company announces many new features