In line with Valentine's Day, Canadian mobile manufacturer BlackBerry shows some love to its consumers by slashing at least $100 from the price of the BlackBerry Passport smartphone.
The company offers $100 discount for U.S. buyers and $125 for Canada-based consumers to all three color variants of the smartphone – black, white, and red. The discount brings the price of the black and white models to $499 and the red variant to $599. The offer will be available until Feb. 16.
According to BlackBerry, the Passport smartphone is aimed at "power professionals" as well as users who still prefer a physical keyboard over touchscreen ones. The device offers main features often used by business pros like email and text messaging. It runs with BB 10.3 OS that offers a virtual assistant similar to Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. There is no need to worry as the handset can run Android apps through the Amazon AppStore.
The handset features a square-like profile, a 4.5-inch screen display with a combination of touchscreen and physical keyboard, quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset and Adreno 330 GPU paired with 3 GB RAM, 13-megapixel back camera, 3450 mAh battery, 32 GB internal storage, and a microSD slot that supports up to 128 GB of additional storage.
The BlackBerry Passport was released by the company in September last year in its attempt to revive its presence in a very competitive industry. It resembles a passport; hence the name. It was off to a good start and reportedly sold out both in the website and Amazon. The company sold 200,000 units.
The BlackBerry brand was once on top during the initial shift of smartphones aimed at business professionals. However, it suffered a big blow after the company's sales plunged by 40 percent last year. Currently, its total market share accounts to less than 1 percent.
