BlackBerry has been proudly showing off its new Passport handset all week and now it’s posted a new blog that highlights something every BlackBerry fan will love: The Passport’s physical keyboard. This isn’t just any BlackBerry keyboard, however — BlackBerry is calling it a “revolutionary” design the likes of which we have never seen before.
What makes this new keyboard so special? For starters, BlackBerry says it rebelliously decided to “break some cherished rules in order to set a new bar for real productivity.” This willingness to get dangerous in search of a better keyboard led BlackBerry to make physical keys that are “responsive to touch, so you have more ways to control your smartphone without having to use the touchscreen.”
And what, exactly, does it mean to have a touch-responsive keyboard? It’s just what it sounds like: It will let you “navigate web pages, apps and e-mails by lightly brushing your fingers over the keys, which helps with things like scrolling and cursor placement,” BlackBerry writes.
For most smartphone users, the promise of controlling a smartphone without having to use the touchscreen sounds a bit like being sold a knife whose chief feature is that it will let us chop food without using the blade. However, the BlackBerry Passport wasn’t designed for iSheep and Fandroids who want to play Candy Crush all day — it’s for people who want to do real work, and that means having a physical keyboard that can fire off emails like no other phone.
The touch responsiveness isn’t the only feature of the new keyboard and we encourage interested users to head on over to BlackBerry’s website to get the full scoop on why the Passport’s keyboard is unlike anything else in the world.
