One of the unique features about the BlackBerry Passport, apart from its looks, would be its keyboard. Unlike regular BlackBerry QWERTY keyboards, BlackBerry has decided to do away with the fourth row of keys, which would be the toolbelt. This means that users of the device will have to perform gestures on the keyboard itself to call up certain keys and so on.
Despite it being a unique feature of the Passport, BlackBerry has yet to share the details of it. However thanks to images obtained by N4BB, we now have a slightly better idea of what the contextual virtual keys on the BlackBerry Passport will look like. As you can see in the image above, you will notice that some of the more special characters are only accessible via gestures, as opposed to it being on the keyboard itself.
Users will be able to choose the special characters via the screen itself. The contextual keyboard was actually mentioned earlier today when BlackBerry accidentally posted on their blog the entire list of features for the BlackBerry Passport, but has since taken it down. According to the description, “So if you’re typing a password on-screen, numbers and symbols commonly used in passwords will automatically pop up. Or if you’re typing an e-mail address, the ‘@’ symbol will be displayed. Or if you’re surfing the Web, the colon and backslash characters needed to type in a URL will be displayed.”
Like we said before, the gesture-based keyboard commands are an interesting touch. This allows BlackBerry to create a more minimalistic phone and at the same time save some save by not having a fourth row of keys. However the question is, will it work out for them? What do you guys think? Is the BlackBerry Passport a phone you’re interested in?
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