Optus is the first carrier in Australia to start selling BlackBerry’s unusually shaped Passport phone.
The square-shaped Passport, which costs $899 outright, is available for order from Optus stores around the country and has been available to pre-order for corporate customers since 1 October.
Aimed at mobile professionals, the phone is the first square screen and touch enabled phone in Australia, said Matthew Ball, managing director for BlackBerry Australia and New Zealand.
The phone has a 4.3-inch screen and has the industry’s first touch-enabled keyboard with gestures, the company claims. Users can scroll web pages or slide along the keys instead of touching the screen to move the cursor. The square shape is designed for viewing documents and websites, the company has stated previously. The phone’s design was inspired by a passport.
The Passport also has a 3450 mAh battery which is the company’s “best battery power to date”.
Along with the Porsche Design P’9983 smartphone from BlackBerry, the Passport is the first to run BlackBerry 10.3.
The Passport screen is 1440x1440 pixels, and the phone has a quad core 2.2 GHz processor, 3 GB RAM, 13 megapixel rear camera and 32GB memory.
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