The BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition is expected to be unveiled at a small media event scheduled for Tuesday, but the technology world got a glimpse of what the upcoming smartphone is all about after a retailer posts images and specs of the device a day ahead of the official launch.
Swiss-based retailer PCP has created a listing for the Passport Silver on Monday. The listing is still there, but the device's specs have since been taken down, but not without the biggest BlackBerry aficionados taking screenshots of them.
As reported earlier, the Passport Silver will be very similar to the BlackBerry Passport. First unveiled as a device codenamed BlackBerry Oslo and then BlackBerry Dallas, the new keyboard-equipped smartphone has a couple of notable differences from its older brother.
First off are the Passport Silver's soft, rounded corners, which will likely give the new handset a more comfortable grip than the Passport, which sports straight, sharp edges.
The pictures also show a small difference in the Passport's Silver's rear camera, which looks a lot like the original Passport's camera but now includes the words "13 Megapixel, OIS, f/2.0" on the silver ring. These are, of course, the same specs on the Passport's rear camera, but eager buyers can expect to see something a little bit more on the Passport Silver's shooter, as BlackBerry CEO John Chen promised back in June about a camera upgrade for the upcoming device.
Aside from those couple of differences, the Passport Silver shares the same specs under the hood as the BlackBerry Passport. To recap, the upcoming BlackBerry smartphone will have a quad-core 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 801 chipset and an Adreno 330 GPU. This will be accompanied by 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage that can be expanded via microSD to 128 GB.
The square, 4.5-inch screen will have a 1,440 x 1,440 resolution, which translates to a pixel density of 453 ppi. As mentioned earlier, the rear camera will have a 13 MP sensor while the front camera will be 2 MP. The battery is a large 3,450 battery, which BlackBerry says can last up to 30 hours. The new Passport Silver will come running with the latest BlackBerry 10.3.2 out of the box. It will be sold for $539.99 in the U.S. market at launch, according to PCP.
