BlackBerry Passport: a square peg in a square hole?

John Davidson

BlackBerry has come up with a reason why your next phone might want to be square. It has to do with the number 66.

Or, rather, the number 60, which is almost 66.

60 is the number of characters you can fit across the screen on BlackBerry's soon-to-be-released Passport phone, you see. That's the phone, pictured above, that has the square, 4.5-inch screen.

66, meanwhile, is the 'optimal number of characters on a line in a book' 'based on academic typology', BlackBerry says in this blog post on its site.

40, on the other hand, is the number of characters you can fit across the screen on your typical smartphone nowadays.

So the maths is simple. 60 is closer to 66 than 40 is, so it must be a better number for your phone. Typing on a phone that is more similar to a book is better than typing on a phone that is nothing like a book.

'The Passport is like the IMAX of productivity, and you don't have to sacrifice screen real estate, vertically or horizontally,' the blog says.

BlackBerry has come up with a few use cases for the Passport's unusual design, including share trading:

'In the area of finance, how about navigating your Web-based trading platform on your device? With enough screen real estate, you can clearly see the fluctuation in your stock and determine whether it's time to sell.'

One use case BlackBerry fails to mention is Instagram. That photo service uses square photos. This phone has a square screen. What could be better?

I guess the problem is, there isn't really an Instagram app for the BlackBerry 10 operating system. You can run an Android version of Instagram on BB10 (BB10 has a built-in Android engine), but in my experience, Instragram is one of the few Android apps that doesn't run well.

The Passport is due for release in September.