The touchscreen smartphone has become one of the most successful product categories of all time. But its popularity has blasted holes in a lot of other industries. So many other product categories are sinking or sunk: pocket cameras, GPS units, music players, voice recorders, radios.
And, oh yeah — the BlackBerry.
Poor, poor BlackBerry. At its peak, about 60 million people a year bought BlackBerry devices (or had them bought for them).
But when the iPhone came out, BlackBerry’s leaders didn’t just miss the boat. They were at the completely wrong port. They were late to add a camera, late to create an app store. Quality slipped. Marketing was nonexistent. The stock tanked (from $150 to about $10 a share). Market share tanked (from 20 percent to under 1 percent). And with the phones sinking, the BlackBerry tablet capsized, too.
Thousands were laid off. The CEO was replaced. The replacement CEO was replaced.
Today, BlackBerry says that it has stabilized, smaller but wiser. It’s going to focus on business customers, exploiting BlackBerry’s famed efficiency and security. As proof, today it offers the first new BlackBerry phone since the new CEO took the helm: the BlackBerry Passport. (It’s $600 without a contract or $250 with a two-year AT&T contract.)
This is one weird-looking phone.
It is, in fact, the size of a U.S. passport. I mean, plenty of people will suppress giggles when they first see it — or fail to suppress them.
The Passport is big and thick and heavy, with a square screen.
Once you get over the awkward size and shape and heft, you start to learn about this thing’s virtues, though, and you feel a little guilty for laughing.
First, there’s the classic, beloved, fantastic BlackBerry thumb keyboard. Real keys that actually move. Bigger and more spaced out than on the much narrower BlackBerry phones of old. It’s wonderful.
Second, what makes this phone thick is the battery. It occurred to somebody over at BlackBerry that what people don’t like about current smartphones is running out of battery every dang day. So this one goes two, even three days on a charge. That’s fantastic.
Yahoo News ....https://www.yahoo.com/tech/the-touchscreen-smartphone-has-become-one-of-the-98286819979.html
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