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No Wallhugging – BlackBerry Passport’s Battery Keeps it going after other Devices Peter Out

What do you call a smartphone with a dead battery?

A paperweight.

It’s true – a dead battery in a smartphone renders it useless.

Here’s another question: how does up to 30 hours of smartphone battery life sound?

Award

Indeed, rigorous third-party testing sponsored by BlackBerry has determined the BlackBerry Passport’s 3,450 mAh battery goes beyond 10, 20, or even 25 hours of mixed use.

As corroborated by reviewers, it’s in the ballpark of “The Big Three-Oh” (or 30 if you need it in digits), and it’s nothing short of a game-changer for users sick of frequent recharges and lost time.

To put that in relative terms, BlackBerry Passport beats out the stamina of leading rival smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S5, iPhone 6 – and even the iPhone 6 Plus – by up to 9 hours.

Battery infographic

(Read on to see the detailed comparative findings.)

Equipped with a competition-besting battery and efficient software and hardware, the BlackBerry Passport just stays “on,” no matter how much work you throw at it.

If you need a paperweight, grab a dead phone from another company.

There’s a Reason for the Stasis

Phablet fever aside, mobile devices have shrunk immensely over the past several decades due to advances in processor efficiency. We’re light years ahead of the giant car phones of yesteryear, like this one:

Car Phone

In the quest for thin, svelte devices, phone battery sizes have remained largely static. As a result, so has the resulting battery life – without the same logarithmic leaps in battery science that we’ve enjoyed in chips, battery power remains proportional to battery size.

What we get are consumer-grade devices all-too-quickly ticking down the minutes until the giant, power-hungry screens wink off.

Range Anxiety: A Life of Outlets and Chargers

This all can lead to “range anxiety,” a term usually associated with electric cars, and with good reason: An electric car’s usefulness is correlated to how far it can go on a single charge. That forces drivers to count the miles between trips and stick to routes with charging stations within reach.

Smartphone users go through a similar process – and similar stress.

Scenario 1:

You start your day after a paltry 5 ½ hours of shuteye, with a slew of scheduled (and unscheduled) meetings before you: meetings at your office, followed by meetings with the agency, followed by a lunch with a colleague to align on approach.

You’ve got data coming in last minute from your team across the globe and you WILL get the plan to the C-Suite by End of Day – even if it kills you.

Of course, you’ll also need to go back to the proverbial drawing board to establish if the solution you were proposing is still valid based on new data. You don’t have the time to sit at a desk with a laptop.

But wouldn’t you know it – as you’re on the train heading home and looking forward to an uninterrupted opportunity to pore over some vital information, your battery indicator starts flashing.

Phone on Train

What do you do?

Do you turn to the guy next to you and ask if you can charge your phone off his laptop? He’d rather share his toothbrush. You might as well ask for some change with that charge.

Scenario 2:

You’re at an all-day trade show, and you’ve made the decision to handle all the work from the trade show floor on your phone (like Wired’s reporters did at CES for the last two years, with a BlackBerry Z30 taking top honors in 2014).

You’ve downloaded the special apps made for the show and events, with those apps running as background processes. All the while you’re live-tweeting and handling various other social media functions.

Unfortunately, the location’s Wi-Fi isn’t any good, and the 4G strength is terrible, with your phone constantly seeking a signal.

No Signal

All those pictures you’re taking are accompanied by your smartphone’s LED flash, and the battery has been draining like a bottle of champagne at a wedding.

You still have to cover the last keynote and send it all off, but there’s no way that’s going to happen on the scant charge you’ve got left.

There aren’t any available outlets near where you need to be, and your charging cable is only a meter long.

What do you do?

Do you sit on the floor in the hall and “hug the wall” for a half hour? You might as well take off for the restroom. There might be an outlet in between the soap puddles and damp paper towels, if you don’t mind charging your phone IN THE RESTROOM.

Both scenarios could go differently – you could be casually powering through with your BlackBerry Passport. Leave the sweat for the exercise room.

Numbers Don’t Lie – Capacity Matters

Whether you want to admit it or not, your battery size is going to make or break your long day of adventure (or misadventure).

Let’s compare the battery capacity in milliamp hours (mAh) of several devices and their resulting actual runtime under mixed use*

Runtime
BlackBerry Passport Up to 30 hours
Samsung Galaxy S5 Up to 23 hours
iPhone 6 Up to 21 hours
iPhone 6 Plus Up to 25 hours

(*Based on third-party lab testing sponsored by BlackBerry, under 4G and 3G wireless conditions, using a mixed-usage profile. Results will vary by carrier and network conditions.)

Feel Free to Travel with BlackBerry Passport

BlackBerry Passport’s 3,450 mAh battery owns the competition and your device wherever you go, helping you do what needs to be done when it needs to be done – no excuses.

For those of you who live in the US, the UK, Canada, France or Germany and are ready to be liberated from the nearest outlet, go straight to ShopBlackBerry.com to get your factory-unlocked BlackBerry Passport.

All other regions can pick it up at www.BlackBerry.com/BuyPassport.

So get a move on, unless you *like* recharging your dead phone.

Matt Young

About Matt Young

Matt Young is a writer and editor with experience in tech, music, news and entertainment. A current Performance Evangelist for Radware, Matt has previous experience with BlackBerry, and Avaya. He has a degree in Journalism from San Jose State University. Follow Matt on Twitter @techunraveler.