With the unveiling of its first phone in two years, BlackBerry has also kicked off a partnership with Amazon that promises to preload the Seattle company’s app store on its devices to offer users a wide range of apps they couldn’t attract on their own.
The integration of the app store was previously announced in June (ironically on the same day Amazon announced the Amazon Fire Phone), but we didn’t know until now how it would work.
Today, onstage at BlackBerry World, the struggling Canadian handset maker unveiled the BlackBerry Passport with an odd 4.5-inch square display. The device also comes loaded with a new version of the company’s signature physical keyboard, which doubles as a trackpad, allowing users to swipe to scroll through content on the adjacent screen.
The Passport is priced aggressively at $599 without a contract, making it cheaper than the latest smartphones from Apple and Samsung. It will be available by the end of the the year in the U.S. and 30 other countries.
The device will come preloaded with both BlackBerry’s own app store called “BlackBerry World,” and the Amazon Appstore. (If you already have a BlackBerry 10 device a software update will give you the same access when the 10.3 operating system is released this fall).
The Passport is geared for the business user in mind. It still boasts a superior email client, and the physical keyboard has always been popular with executives who type a lot. The addition of Amazon’s Appstore is designed to balance the phone out, allowing BlackBerry users to access thousands of fun apps, including popular applications such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft.
In a blog post this morning, BlackBerry suggests that once you’ve loaded up with new tools for working, you should hit up the Amazon Appstore, where you’ve got “access to a huge selection of Android apps and games in the Amazon Appstore on your BlackBerry Passport.” Similarly, to the Amazon Appstore experience found on the Kindle Fire devices, Amazon will be giving away one paid Android app a day for free.
Even with access to two app stores, however, there are some shortfalls.
Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal writes in her review of the Passport: “the apps I use every day, like Google’s or Uber or Snapchat, are missing. And despite the perfect square shape of the screen, there’s no Instagram.”
The financial arrangement between the two companies has not been disclosed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a lot of money exchanging hands. BlackBerry desperately needed access to the wide variety of Android apps and the larger potential audience that BlackBerry offers for Amazon doesn’t hurt either when luring more developers to its platform.
