BlackBerry CEO John Chen has confirmed the company is getting ready to launch a phablet later this year.
Dubbed the Passport, it is a strange-looking, almost square beast with a 4.5in, 1,400 x 1,400 resolution display, as shown in these photos taken by Crackberry at a press event yesterday evening.
Here’s a clearer shot of John Chen and the #BlackBerry Passport pic.twitter.com/LevDPCqFVu
— David Friend (@dj_friend) June 19, 2014
Alongside the 90-degree corners and giant size – at 3.18in wide, it is bigger than the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 – it has a physical Qwerty keyboard.
Beyond these physical features, little else is known about the device. It will be officially launched in September this year, before going on sale in 2015.
Rumours that BlackBerry was working on a new phablet have been kicking around for a while.
According to earlier reports in TechRadar the Passport, which was code-named Windermere, will have a Snapdragon MSM8974 processor, Adreno 330 GPU and 3GB of RAM, as well as a 3,450mAh charge battery.
Chen himself recently hinted at the development of a new phablet in an interview with The Jakarta Post.
The Passport was shown off alongside another new device, the BlackBerry Classic, which, as its name suggests, looks much like the Qwerty smartphones that made the company so successful in the early 2000s. Other than its looks, not much is known about this device either.
Chen confirmed the Passport’s development yesterday in an earnings call that saw BlackBerry cut its quarterly losses by over $300 million.
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