BlackBerry Unveils Passport Smartphone

BlackBerry on Wednesday officially launched its Passport smartphone as it looks to mount yet another attempt at a comeback.

The Passport is available today through its website, ShopBlackBerry.com and through Amazon. In the US, it will sell for $599 without a wireless service contract, $699 in Canada, 649 euros in France and German, and £529 in the UK.

BlackBerry said AT&T would sell the smartphone, but didn’t give a specific date of availability.

The Passport represents BlackBerry’s latest shot at reviving its struggling smartphone business, which has faded over the last several years as consumers increasingly switched to Apple’s iPhone and Android smartphones.

With a 4.5-inch square display and a touch-sensitive physical keyboard, the Passport stands out as a unique-looking product.

BlackBerry hopes that will help attract curious customers who miss their physical keyboards, but, still prefer a larger display.

The Passport’s offers a 1440 by 1440 display with 453 pixels per inch, Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3, a 3,450 mAh battery, a quad-core 2.2 gigahertz processor, 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of memory, and a 13 megapixel optical image stabilized rear camera.

The phone also comes preloaded with BlackBerry’s latest BlackBerry 10.3 operating system, and the company’s Siri-like BlackBerry Assistant.