BlackBerry Passport review: Ticket to ride

Synthetic benchmarks

The BlackBerry Passport runs on a Snapdragon 801 chipset with a quad-core 2.26 GHz Krait 400 CPU and Adreno 330 GPU. BlackBerry has thrown in a hefty 3GB of RAM, which all told make the Passport the most robust BlackBerry to date.

The screen resolution is an unconventional 1440 x 1440px, which is an identical amount of pixels as 1080p. This means that in terms of graphics, the 4.5-inch display on the Passport has a comparable workload to a standard 4.5" FullHD display.

As the BlackBerry OS is capable of running Android benchmarks, we downloaded/sideloaded a few to test out the performance of the Passport. Not all of them ran, however, as BlackBerry 10.3 is no Android, so the below benchmark results and comparisons should considered with that important caveat in mind.

We get things underway with our compound benchmarks, which take into account not only raw processing power, but other aspects like RAM and GPU. As Geekbench 3 refused to run, we had to rely on AnTuTu 5 and Basemark OS 2 for our results here.

Numbers under AnTuTu proved to be underwhelming, similarly for overall and single-core Basemark results. Multi-core results are slightly higher, beating out some flagship 'droids.

AnTuTu 5

Higher is better

• HTC One (E8)
  46857
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  46824
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  43676
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  43164
• Sony Xperia Z3
  40393
• LG G3 - EU version
  39905
• BlackBerry Passport
  35173
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  18245

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  1181
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  1176
• HTC One (E8)
  1146
• LG G3 - EU version
  1126
• Sony Xperia Z3
  1109
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  1082
• BlackBerry Passport
  628
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  526

Basemark OS II (single-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  2588
• HTC One (E8)
  2579
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  2415
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  2409
• LG G3 - EU version
  2213
• Sony Xperia Z3
  2114
• BlackBerry Passport
  2061
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  1123

Basemark OS II (multi-core)

Higher is better

• HTC One (E8)
  10219
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  10063
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  9948
• BlackBerry Passport
  9916
• LG G3 - EU version
  9611
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  9446
• Sony Xperia Z3
  8792
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  5001

Basemark X was the only Android graphics benchmark we could get to run on the Passport. It posted comparable results to the current crop of flagships. Keep in mind that most games will be either cropped or stretched on the Passport's square screen.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  18684
• Sony Xperia Z3
  12637
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  11855
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  11744
• LG G3 - EU version
  11552
• BlackBerry Passport
  10682
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  3142
• HTC One (E8)
  3063

Finally, our web browsing benchmarks test JavaScript and HTML5 performance. Both Kraken and BrowserMark run in-browser, meaning that they are not OS-specific. This means that Android compatibility doesn't factor into the abysmal performance provided by the BlackBerry Passport when it comes to browsing benchmarks.

Kraken 1.1

Lower is better

• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  4650
• Apple iPhone 6
  4710
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  5351
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  6043
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  6209
• Sony Xperia Z3
  6355
• HTC One (E8)
  6460
• LG G3 - EU version
  6987
• BlackBerry Passport
  14624
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  15988

BrowserMark 2.1

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  3389
• Apple iPhone 6
  3153
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  2208
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  1600
• Sony Xperia Z3
  1533
• LG G3 - EU version
  1474
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  1398
• HTC One (E8)
  1362
• Motorola Moto G (2014)
  1085
• BlackBerry Passport
  1030

The performance numbers are not the best, but we can't forget the important asterisk that's paired with most of them: these are benchmarks designed for Android and not BlackBerry. With that important distinction, the Passport isn't able to match the flagship competition in most areas.

The low web browsing numbers are also a bit of a surprise. The BlackBerry 10 OS is younger than its iOS and Android counterparts, however, so future OS and browser updates could improve the scores we saw here.