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Get a closer look at the BlackBerry Passport (pictures)

The BlackBerry Passport is a squat, square device meant for keyboard fans. Let's take a closer look.

Nate Ralph
Associate Editor Nate Ralph is an aspiring wordsmith, covering mobile software and hardware for CNET Reviews. His hobbies include dismantling gadgets, waxing poetic about obscure ASCII games, and wandering through airports.
Josh Miller Senior Photographer
Nate Ralph
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The BlackBerry Passport

The BlackBerry Passport has a very distinctive squat, square chassis that will prove divisive.

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Touch-enabled keyboard

The keyboard is the star of the show. It's touch-enabled, so you can use it as a sort of touchpad to scroll about websites and documents with. It feels great to type on, too.

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An unwieldy workhorse

The phone is wide -- too wide. The  5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3 (right) is actually more comfortable to hold, so folks with smaller hands may find the BlackBerry Passport a challenge.

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The phone's square 4.5-inch display has a resolution of 1,440x1,440 pixels.

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The Passport is fairly light at 6.9 ounces (196 grams), and is 9.1mm thick.

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BlackBerry Assistant

The BlackBerry Assistant is the company's take on personal assistants such as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. You can ask it for sports scores, schedule a meeting or simply send a text, all using your voice.

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Dedicated voice assist button

The dedicated voice-assist button sits between the volume buttons. Press and hold to quickly access the BlackBerry Assistant.

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The Amazon Appstore

BlackBerry OS 10.3 brings support for Android apps, care of the Amazon Appstore. It isn't nearly as full-featured as the Google Play store, but you'll find many popular Android apps.

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A serviceable camera

The camera churns out serviceable photos; some details are softened, but images still look quite nice. You can also shoot in 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, if the square 1:1 shots feel rather odd.

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Powerful hardware

A quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is accompanied by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage space.

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Plenty of expandable storage

The microSD card slot can support up to 128GB of expandable memory, so many of your files can come along for the ride.

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