Up until now, if you wanted to get either the incredibly square BlackBerry Passport or QWERTY-obsessed BlackBerry Classic in the United States, your only bet was to buy them unlocked at full price. Now you can get both handsets through a carrier, as AT&T announced it will carry both handsets, starting February 20.
On the inside, these Passport and Classic handsets look to be the same as their unlocked counterparts. Starting with the Passport, we’re looking at a 4.5-inch, 1440 x 1440 display, a quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel rear camera. The Classic, meanwhile, truly does keep it classic with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 3.5-inch 720 x 720 display, and a 8-megapixel rear camera. Both phones have full QWERTY keyboards.
Interestingly, the Passport has been slightly redesigned. As opposed to the sharp corners found on its unlocked sibling, the AT&T variant of the Passport arrives with smoother curves.
You can grab the Passport on AT&T for $200 on-contract, $650 with no commitments, and $0 down through AT&T’s Next plans. Meanwhile, the more traditional Classic will go for $50 on-contract and $450 off-contract. In our reviews of both devices, the Passport and Classic didn’t set the world on fire, though we thought they successfully reestablished BlackBerry’s reputation as a maker of tools, not toys.