I heard about it, I read about it, I saw the photos and said: Blackberry is crazy to think that this phone will get them back to where they were before.

I saw the phone at retail shelves and felt: hmm, very weird looking phone.

I typed on the keyboard a little and said: This keyboard sucks, it’s too unusual to serve as a proper blackberry keyboard.

All signs pointed me to a huge No No No. But then again, this is Blackberry we’re talking about and I have a crush on Blackberry like I have a crush on Charlize Theron. She really doesn’t have to do much, all she has to do is show up on the set and I’d be like: Action. Everything becomes better with Charlize Theron, even Ebola.

To prove my point, picture this: Hi, I’m Charlize Theron and I’m going to give you Ebola, would you like to have coffee with me? 
If your answer is yes, you’re a man. If no, please don’t leave the house without your man parts.

But I digress, the fact is, nothing will ever get Blackberry to where they were before. That time has passed and Blackberry should not be in the business of being where they were in 2007. They need to think about where they need to be in 2018.

A few weeks pass by and I’m with my iPhone 6 “Great phone by the way, the most complete phone on the market today to be honest” and I thought about change so I did the unthinkable: I sold my iPhone 6 and took myself to the nearest Store to find the Blackberry Passport. It wasn’t easy.

I don’t know if it’s an artificial supply constraint, but the phone wasn’t available at Sharaf DG, Virgin or Axiom. So I dug a little deeper and found one in E-City in the mall of the Emirates. 2600 Dh later, I was committed.

Now, I had no iPhone 6 and had this weird looking Blackberry device with a square screen, an unorthodox keyboard with touch capabilities I haven’t used yet and a purported long battery life. I. Better. Investigate.

First stop: Unboxing and activating

I went to the nearest cafe to insert my Sim into the phone, remember, I dumped the iPhone 6 for this and had worries about me shelling out 20 Dh to get a replacement SIM card.

The Box itself is very standard but very well thought out. Once you open it you see the Blackberry Passport huge square screen sitting on top of a manual that looks like “you guessed it, a passport”. I open up the manual and start reading: Nano SIM… Yay. I won’t be needing a new replacement SIM. We’re off to a good start.

Once I established that I don’t need another trip to the nearest du store, everything seems to be alright. The charger, the USB cable, the headset.

Note about the headset: I don’t know about you, but the Blackberry Headset while looking premium in style and finish, doesn’t fit my ears very well, they are oddly shaped and I could never figure out if I was supposed to use ear buds with them or not. But what do I care? I have the Bose In Ear Noise canceling headphones. They took me back nearly 400 Dollars but when the office gets loud, I just push the noise canceling button and poof!! Noise be gone. So I didn’t even sweat the Blackberry headset.

By now you know that Blackberry has gone full BIS, that is to say.. you don’t need BES anymore and that’s just fine, because I don’t want some dim wit in IT installing policies on my phone telling me what I can or can’t do with my phone. A few minutes later I was connected to LTE and the B symbol was in full glory.

Second stop: BBM

The good news first:
You either have a Blackberry account with an associated BBM pin like me, in which case all you have to do is log on and Blackberry will switch you from the old pin to the new pin without losing your contacts. This has always been a great feature of Blackberry, contact management and syncing.

You can now do stickers “Which come in really handy when you have nothing to say to her”, retract messages “for when you’ve said too much”, timed message “You know what that’s for, moving on” and use Glance to send live location updates to that weird person in your life who wants to know where you are and how long will it take you to get there. Also can be used with friends at get togethers.

If you don’t have a Blackberry account, you will have to setup a new one, name, email, password, blah blah blah. And you’re done.

That was the good news, here comes the bad news:

BBM is like a ghost town. My contacts “nearly 50 of them” have all gone elsewhere, there are a few who still keep their BBM active, but that’s probably because they still have friends who use it. All in All, BBM is still great, still secure “Not iMessage secure, iMessage is the most secure consumer messaging platform out there now” ,  still feature rich but has few people on it.

By now I was in full blown panic mode, 2600 Dh down the drain, so I head off to the Blackberry App world (which really should be called App country, App city, App village, anything but world) to see which Apps are available.

Third stop: Blackberry App world

I’m just gonna come out and say it, Blackberry App world:

• Has the least number of apps.
• Has the least snazzy looking apps.
• Has the least number of built for Blackberry Apps, which is a seal of approval from Blackberry to developers who have completely built BB10 specific apps from the bottom to the top using swipes, hub integration and other Blackberry specific stuff.

It seemed that there was no way in hell that I was going to get the same experience and choices that I would get with the Appstore, PlayStore or even the Microsoft store (whatever the name of that thing is), So I had to be surgical about this.

Here is what you need to know in order for the Blackberry experience to work for you:

• Facebook? Yes, native Facebook client exists.
• Twitter? Yes, native twitter client exists plus 3 other option (Special mention goes to Blaq, a twitter client designed for Blackberry).
• Evernote: Native Evernote client, or you can use Blackberry own Remember App which is just like Evernote only looks different.
• Foursquare? Yes to Foursquare, no to Swarm.
• Instagram? No native Instagram client , but you can install the Android version or choose iGran or Blackgram. Both iGran and Blackgram provide on the Blackberry a much better experience than the native Instagram experience on iOS and Android, mainly because of the Re-Gram or Re-share function.
• Flipboard: No native Flipboard client, but you can install the Android version, it runs really really well on the Passport.
• Tinder? You should be ashamed of yourself, but yes, there is a Blackberry client for Tinder called Timber. Word on the street is that after many hours of use it is wonderful to use and the really big screen gives you a lot to look at. But then again, I wouldn’t know, I’m only told, so there.
• Widgets: What are widgets ?
• Task switching: Task switching on Blackberry is far superior to anything out there, including iOS and Android. It’s just better.
• Sharing to: Yes, you can now share your images to Evernote or Instagram or whatever App that supports sharing. Laaaaaameuhhh!!!
• Email: Blackberry has the best email reading or writing experience on the planet. Keep your MailBox with it’s I’ll do this tomorrow gimmicks and your google Inbox with it’s material design or whatever that is and it’s bundles? do they call it bundles? Anyway, those who make decisions using email know one thing… that thing is Blackberry.
• Notifications: If Blackberry ever becomes a software only company, they really should license the hub to other companies. The hub is a unique way of seeing all your relevant messages and notifications in one place that is on the left of your screen. I have setup my work email, my gmail, my other gmail used for spam. Also, other apps that are Blackberry Savvy feature hub integration so you can have an app by App history of notification. Nothing ever gets lost with the hub. Nothing.

There is the Amazon Android store it comes with the phone and allows you to log on to your amazon account then download whatever Android Apps you fancy from the Amazon store, still not the best choice. For more choice, you need to Sideload SNAP, when you absolutely positively got to have every Android App on your blackberry, accept no substitutes.

Do these Android Apps work? Let me tell you:
Some Android apps work better on Blackberry than they do on Android, with none of that annoying “Oh we’re sorry, but Android has stopped working now. Why don’t you deal with it or get a real phone where Apps don’t crash at all or when they do, you really don’t care because your phone is so beautiful?”.

Some Android Apps flat out won’t work properly. Something about the screen makes the adjustment of screen size and icon locations weird. You could swipe from the top down to force the system to zoom out or zoom in, sometimes that helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. Depends on the way the App was built.

By now you have made your bed and have to lay in it. Time to check out what people really use their phones for:

Fourth Stop: The Screen

The quality of the Blackberry Passport screen is insane.

So insane that when you combine it with the Passport’s size 4.5’’ square, the passport’s screen resolution 453 ppi. I have no longer any use for my Kindle PaperWhite. Seriously, my kindle is now in the drawer… and I love my kindle.

You Sir, want to read books on this screen, you need to read books on this screen. Not on the iPhone 6 or 6 plus screen, on the Passport it feels much more natural, like holding a piece of paper in your hand.

Right, moving on then.

Fifth Stop: The camera

• On paper, the Passport has an amazing camera. 13.0MP, 60fps, Optical image stabilization, 1080p video, etc etc.  But all of these numbers mean nothing and fade into the background when you’re taking photos.

Here is my experience:

• Focus time? The camera does not focus fast enough for my taste. In fact, focus times have often in my case been up to a second. Not cool.
• Image quality? Not iPhone like, Not Lumia Like, but very very very very good. So good in fact that if you make the a switch, yo won’t regret it on account of substandard photography. It’s just that good.
• Low light: This is no Lumia that sees in the dark, nor is it an iPhone that succeeds through great software in taking the best picture possible at all time. As far as I’m concerned, low light performance is when the phone sees better in the dark than me. Thats how I judge the iPhone, that’s how I judge the Lumia and every other phone out there. If it can see better than me in the dark, we’re good to go. As I sat there at Ritz Carlton DIFC having a sheesha “please order blueberry grape, you’re welcome”, I took a photo of a nearby something, I can’t really remember what it was. It could have been a plant, a table or a girl…any who.  What I do remember is that the Passport saw without the flash much better than what I saw with my own eyes.

There are other things to consider of course like Macro mode, suitable for cat or plant or insect photography. Video performance for when you want to be physically in a concert but be also away from it because you’re looking at your phone. In short, video is also very good. But I’ll leave these things to the numbers guys. Phones are very personal devices and they are all about how you feel using them.

Last stop: Battery life

If you play your cards right, you could last for a couple of days on a single charge.
If you go crazy, and I go crazy with my phone, the phone lasts a full day. It will take you from waking up at 6am to going to bed at 11pm before making you think about recharging. Mileage may vary.

Why did I leave my iPhone 6 behind?

Where do I start?

• Because there are hundreds of millions of people world wide with an iPhone 6 Plus or an Android phone, some even have Microsoft phones. There are very few with the Blackberry Passport. Get this phone and you will stand out, in a good way.
• Because for all it’s perfection, the iPhone 6 does not have that oomph to it. It is soft around the edges, it looks like the old phone only bigger better faster. It’s all so boring really. Kind of like the VW Golf GTi. Perfectly engineered and priced car, but looks soooo.. pedestrian.
• Because you no longer have to engage in the quaint iPhone vs Android endless debates.
• Because it is extremely well designed and durable.
• Because it has a much better battery life.
• Because nearly all the apps I care about are there. The rest of the apps are just distractions.
• Because Blackberry should not be allowed to die.

Mostly, because I feel cooler and happier holding this phone than when I’m carrying the iPhone. Some people will have a different feeling, but this is mine.