Passport to nowhere

For the last couple of weeks, I've been using a BlackBerry Passport as my main mobile device. ITWeb will have a full technical review up soon, but the experience has also highlighted some of the obstacles facing anyone challenging the established might of Apple and Android - not only BlackBerry, but Microsoft, Samsung's Tizen, and the niche players on the horizon like Firefox and Sailfish.

Let's get the basics out of the way: the Passport is one hell of a phone. I love using it, but I do wish it ran Android, because I'm a brainwashed Google fanboy.

The Passport really has a lot going for it. The screen is the best I've ever seen, the battery lasts forever (well, a couple of days, anyway), the chunky form factor isn't nearly as much of an issue as people seem to expect, and the physical keyboard is a very welcome re-introduction. So what's not to like? Basically, there aren't any apps.

Oh, sure, BlackBerry World has 130 000 apps in it, or whatever the number is now. But many are total crap, same as in Microsoft's app store - knock-offs, outright fakes, or nothing more than a launcher which opens, say, the Google Drive Web page.

And I'm not talking about entertainment - BlackBerry has (rightly) no interest in competing with thousands of Flappy Bird rip-offs. Productivity apps are missing. There's no Podio, no Trello, no Do.com. (Evernote is there, and wow does it rock that big screen.) Traditional apps? No Sage ERP. No Oracle. SAP through a third-party only. Survey a hundred enterprise users and ask them what productivity apps they use, and you'll get dozens of different answers, but the vast majority will have native support on Android and iOS only.

BlackBerry tries to tackle that by adding support for Android apps, but the bundled Amazon store doesn't work at all (this appears to be a problem with my account, to be fair, but it is what it is). And yes, there's a myriad of third-party side-loading options but I'm acutely aware that we tell Android users that's a really bad idea, so basically it's all a bit of a mess.

Even within the context of apps BB10 does support well, I find myself struggling. For all the device is laser-focused on productivity (I'm told) it feels like a return to 1990s Microsoft office computing. There's no support for archiving Google e-mails, for instance, much less the quick swipes I'm used to - it's all multiple taps and delete-or-nothing.

The document editor is great and integrates nicely with Dropbox and Skydrive (no Google Drive, natch) but doesn't appear to know about sharing, so you're back to mailing them to and fro. If there's one feature that sums up BlackBerry's approach to productivity, it's this: the e-mail client defaults to "Reply to all". I rest my case.

Unfortunately, the innovations in the Passport (and there are plenty) won't be enough to save it.

And that's when it struck me: it's not only about the apps. It's about the working mindset: Apple and Google have successfully trained their users to think and behave very differently to the office workers of yesteryear. I almost never e-mail documents anymore, because I don't want multiple obsolete revisions circulating. I share them, and expect people to interact with them directly, chatting with me while we collaborate on them. And sharing is baked so integrally into Android that I do it almost without thinking, where on BB10 it's, well, just not as productive.

Unfortunately, the innovations in the Passport (and there are plenty) won't be enough to save it. Nor will more apps - the company is making headway in getting Android apps onto BB10, though there's still plenty of work to be done. BlackBerry needs to embrace the new styles of productivity in vogue, and make it attractive as a target for the developers of up-and-coming enterprise cloud and mobile apps.

At that point, it'll be competing squarely (heh) with other phablets and if it stopped there it might as well just adopt Android and have done with it. So there's a vital next step: once there, BlackBerry needs to establish itself as a new and better style of productivity. It's got the engineering chops to do it, and the Passport+BB10 is a good platform to build on, but I do wonder whether it can gather enough momentum.

Does that mean it's DOA? Not at all. Lots of people still work that old way, and BlackBerry will fit very neatly into their style of productivity. I question whether that's a paradigm that will last, though, and whether the innovations in the device will be enough to establish a toehold - frankly, I'd give Microsoft a better chance, and I'm not crazy about Windows Mobile either.

All of which is too bad, really, because the Passport is probably the best phone I've ever used. If it shipped in an Android or even Windows variant, with tight Google or Office 365 integration, I'd be first in the queue.