Blackberry's new Passport is unlike any other

in mobile on 2014-09-25 10:06 (#2SWV)

Blackberry has released a phone that either pushes the boundary of phone design in useful ways, or proposes a new and unusable form factor, according to your personal pre-inclination. The Register reviews it and calls it crazy, but full of great ideas. It's square, for one, a radical departure from the candy-bar form factor so prevalent in modern smartphones. It's also sporting improvements to its QNX-based new OS, a great screen, and reportedly a 30 hour battery life. It runs Android apps natively, with no apparent lag or problem. Lastly, the keyboard doubles as a trackpad - something you'll either love or hate. The Guardian takes a look at it here, and offers some other insights. There are some lovely pictures at The Verge, who conclude, by they way that they don't like it.

[Ed. note: Me, I want one.]

Re: This is a put-on, right? (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-25 22:19 (#2SY3)

Who wants to run emulated Android on a battery powered handheld?

It isn't emulated, actually. Blackberry has an ARM CPU just like Android, so native apps can be run on the processor without any emulation. BB just has to provide compatible ABI hooks to the OS. This is a reduced version of what WINE does for Windows applications on Linux, but Android being open source means there's no need for reverse engineering, and having far less legacy means it's much easier to develop full compatibility quickly.

"In Wine, the Windows application's compiled x86 code runs at full native speed on the computer's x86 processor, just as it does when running under Windows."

And with the non-native Android applications, it's even easier. They're basically Java applets, interpreted by the Dalvik VM when run on Android. It's not big deal for other OSes to develop their own almost-JRE compatible with Dalvik, and run Android apps as well as Android.