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Professionals interested in a secure smartphone will be able to buy the BlackBerry Passport from Optus stores.
Preorders for the Passport opened in October with customers now taking collection. The smartphone has since gone on sale in stores to both business and personal customers, although no stock of the smartphone is being kept on premises.
An Optus spokesperson told Good Gear Guide in an email customers will have to return to the store days later to pick-up the smartphone:
"Customers who wish to order the Blackberry Passport can pop into their local store to order the phone through Optus. It is then delivered to the store that it was ordered from approximately 2-3 days after the customer places the order."
Differentiating the Passport from the masses of smartphones is its unusual form factor. It has a square 4.5in screen with a 1440x1400 resolution. Boarding the base is a three-row QWERTY keyboard that doubles as a gesture-fluent trackpad.
Inside beats a 2.2GHz quad-core CPU, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. There’s also a slot for microSD memory cards tucked away under a back panel.
The smartphone runs BlackBerry 10 (version 10.3) and has access to 250,00 applications in the Amazon web store.
Good Gear Guide has asked Optus for detailed pricing. This article will be updated with their response. Optus is selling the BlackBerry Passport outright for $899.
