BlackBerry Passport On Sale At Just Under New iPhone Retail Price

QWERTY keyboard lovers across the UK can get their fix after the BlackBerry Passport went on sale at selected Carphone Warehouse stores.

The smartphone can be picked up for £529.95 SIM-free or free-of-charge when taking out a 24-month contract, the cheapest of which starts off at just £30.50 per-month.

Vodafone’ £30.50 monthly tariff offers 600 any network minutes as well as unlimited UK texts and 1GB of 4G data with EE offering a £19.99 monthly deal that includes 500 minutes, unlimited texting and 500MB of 4G data as long as £149.99 is spent on the device.

Buying the smartphone SIM free is just £10 cheaper than the lowest option for the Apple iPhone 6 that has a 16GB memory and weighs in at £539.

CEO John Chen has previously stated that the phone, at its current price of $599 in the US, is actually underpriced by around $100 and the company went for a lower selling price to give it a chance to regain the significant ground lost to the likes of Apple and Samsung.

60 Chars Per Line

BlackBerry’s new smartphone sees it return to the QWERTY keyboard that helped it make a name for itself in the enterprise sector and the touch surface means that many on screen commands can be handled by simply using the keyboard.

It has a 4.5in squared screen that has been designed with ease of working in mind and is able to display 60 characters per line as opposed to regular portrait screens that show 40 characters.

The vendor is also planning to bring the new handset to a range of Asian countries in order to tap into the emerging markets that are proving ripe for growth in the smartphone sector.