First Look: BlackBerry Passport

BlackBerry does an about-face, back towards its enterprise roots.

So BB 10 didn't work out so well, did it?
Which helps explain why, with the new Passport smartphone, BlackBerry is ditching the years-late emphasis on competing for consumers and refocusing on the enterprise users on which the company was built. The Passport is uniquely focused on being a device for work first and personal stuff second - take a look at how it's turned out.

It's hip to be square
We're just not used to square screens anymore, are we? I think the last one I used was on a flip-phone, circa about 2005. So in a sense, BlackBerry's not putting the Passport in great company there. Given that this screen is 4.5 inches and boasts 1440x1440 resolution, though, it's probably OK.

Big in Canada
It's a big device, there's no getting around that - as the name suggests, it's the size of a U.S. passport. That said, it's no more outsized than other recently released phablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or the iPhone 6 Plus.

Of course it has a keyboard
It's a new design, and it incorporates some intriguing touchpad functionality, like swiping to select auto-suggest entries. And it's a business-focused BlackBerry device - of course it has a physical keyboard.

A voice search thingy!
One of many catch-up boxes checked by the Passport, the new voice search functionality appears to work more or less the same way as Siri/Cortana/Google Voice search, et al.

Blend
The impressive BlackBerry Blend system provides an app that can run on other mobile devices, as well as on desktops and laptops, that brings files and messages from the Passport to whichever device you happen to be using at the time, and segregates them into personal and enterprise spaces.

Some apps
BlackBerry bolsters its own somewhat limited app offerings with access to the Amazon App Store, which provides a larger selection of Android apps for use on the Passport.

Under the hood
The Passport's specs bring it into line with the latest Androids and iPhones - a 2.2GHz, quad-core Snapdragon processor, 3GB of RAM, a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization and 32GB of on-board storage, with a microSD slot for expandability. It's also got a big 3450 mAh battery, which BlackBerry was eager to talk up.

The nitty-gritty
The Passport goes on sale tomorrow from Amazon and BlackBerry directly, for $600 unlocked. It'll be available on-contract from as-yet unspecified carriers for about $250, BlackBerry said.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Google-led group warns of 'patent privateers

BlackBerry, Red Hat, Google and EarthLink say businesses use patent trolls as mercenaries to harass the competition

Patent trolls are increasingly becoming a weapon some companies can use to harm or harass their competitors, according to public comments jointly submitted today to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department by lawyers for Google, Red Hat, BlackBerry and EarthLink.

The comment detail what the companies say is a rising tide of so-called "patent privateering" and called for a large-scale government probe of the matter. The term refers to the practice of selling patents to a patent-assertion entity (or patent troll), which enables the troll to turn around and sue a competitor without the original company having to expose itself to negative publicity or countersuits.

Google senior competition counsel Matthew Bye explained why the process works in an official blog post.

"Trolls use the patents they receive to sue with impunity - since they don't make anything, they can't be countersued. The transferring company hides behind the troll to shield itself from litigation, and sometimes even arranges to get a cut of the money extracted by troll lawsuits and licenses," he wrote.

What's more, according to the companies, patent privateering can be used to circumvent fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing agreements - exposing businesses that made good-faith decisions to create products based on a given technology to infringement suits by trolls.

Google and its co-signers urged an FTC investigation into the practice, saying that the extent of patent privateering and its effects is difficult to quantify without additional information.

"The secrecy in which PAEs cloak their activities exacerbates all of these concerns and leaves the public without information needed to access the likely competitive effects of patent outsourcing practices," the companies said.

Google recently announced an Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge, saying that it will agree never to sue over the use of some designated patents unless attacked first. The first 10 patents in the program all relate to MapReduce, a big data processing model.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com