Blackberry Passport launched in India for Rs. 49,990

Blackberry launched its latest flagship smartphone, the Blackberry passport, in India on Monday.  As the name suggests, it has been designed to match the size of a passport and is priced at Rs. 49,990. The smartphone was announced last week internationally and India is one of the first countries where the phone will be available.

BlackBerry has said that the phone will be available for prebooking from Amazon.in from September 29 (today) till October 10 (next month). Customers who pre-booked the phone will get a gift voucher worth Rs 5,000 which can be redeemed during future purchases from Amazon.in. Frequent fliers with Jet Airways would also receive 5000 complimentary miles to their existing JP account.

The Passport has a 4.5 inches square touch screen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, something traditional BlackBerry users prefer. The physical keyboard is also touch-enabled. It’s responsive to touch so a user can scroll web pages, flick to type or slide along the keys to move the cursor.

It is powered by a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor coupled with a 3GB of RAM. The BlackBerry Passport runs on BlackBerry 10.3 OS. The Amazon Appstore come pre-installed on the device itself. Users can also download apps from the BlackBerry World.

In the imaging department, BlackBerry Passport surprisingly features a 13-megapixel camera with auto focus, Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) and an LED Flash. The rear camera is also capable of recording video in Full HD. There's a 2-megapixel front-facing shooter as well.

It houses a 32GB of native storage and also takes in a microSD card. Connectivity options include NFC, Miracast, Bluetooth v4.0, Wi-Fi and 4G LTE/3G among others. Being a high-profile phone, the makers have added a large 3,450mAh battery. The phone's battery should last up to 30 hours on a single charge.

BlackBerry has increasingly lost relevance as a smartphone company in the years since the 2007 launch of Apple iPhone and the 2008 introduction of Google-powered Android phones. The the once-iconic company is now determined to win back market share under John Chen, who took over as the Chief executive last year.

The handset maker has narrowed its net loss for the second quarter ended August 31, 2014 to USD 207 million compared to the previous year helped by increased