BlackBerry officially launched its new Passport smartphone, an odd-looking, square-shaped handset that is designed with productivity in mind.

The company has been bleeding customers for years and lost most of its market share to rivals, but it's still struggling to make a comeback and stay relevant in an increasingly-competitive smartphone market. The BlackBerry Passport is its latest effort to keep its head above the water, and the smartphone has definitely drawn plenty of interest.

The BlackBerry Passport launch took place near-simultaneously in three locations - Toronto, London, and Dubai - on Wednesday, Sept. 24. All eyes were on BlackBerry and its odd-shaped smartphone, and the company boasts that the launch was among the hottest-trending topics on Twitter in the U.S. and Canada.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen touted that the BlackBerry Passport finally allows him to handle business meetings without having to carry a laptop around anymore, as the smartphone's focus on productivity takes things to the next level.

"This is more than powerful enough of a tool for my productivity," Chen said, highlighting that the BlackBerry Passport's strong I-beam frame also makes it tougher and more durable compared to other rival smartphones that may be prone to warping.

"I will challenge you guys to bend our BlackBerry Passport," he added, obviously taking a not-so-subtle jab at Apple and its new iPhone 6 Plus, which has stirred a firestorm of mockery and criticism over its warping issues. For those unfamiliar with the matter, reports started to pile up over the past couple of days as many new iPhone 6 Plus owners revealed that their device bended and distorted under normal pressure, such as keeping the smartphone in a pants pocket.

BlackBerry Passport specs

In terms of specifications, the BlackBerry Passport sports a 4.5-inch in-cell IPS LCD Touch display with a square shape and an odd resolution of 1440 x 1440 pixels. The screen is 30 percent wider than a typical 5-inch smartphone display and can display 60 characters across each row, as opposed to the 40 characters on a regular, rectangular phone display. BlackBerry claims that the Passport's display is perfect for handling documents, surfing the Internet, working on spreadsheets, reading e-books, and others such.

Under the hood, the BlackBerry Passport packs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.2GHz, paired with 3GB of RAM. The handset comes with 32GB of internal storage capacity, as well as microSD support for additional memory of up to 128GB. Other specs include a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front shooter, each with image and video stabilization support, as well as HD video recording capabilities. According to the company, the smartphone will deliver 30 hours of battery life with mixed use.

The new BlackBerry Passport also comes with an interesting keyboard, with three rows of physical keys, each separated by frets. The keyboard also sports backlit, sculpted keys, which should make it notably easier and more comfortable to type. These three rows, however, have no dedicated keys for numbers, punctuation, or other symbols, as these characters are delivered as virtual keys that appear just above the top row of the physical keyboard. If you're composing a message, for instance, you'll see punctuation keys appear above the top row. Moreover, the physical keys are also touch-enabled, which means that users will be able to swipe up and down to scroll, or move their thumb across the buttons to move the cursor.

On the software side, the new BlackBerry Passport runs BlackBerry 10.3, the latest version of the company's mobile operating system, which also adds BlackBerry Assistant to the mix. BlackBerry Assistant, as the name itself suggests, is the company's new digital assistant and answer to Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now.

Pricing and Availability

In terms of pricing and availability, the unlocked BlackBerry Passport is available for purchase through the ShopBlackBerry website for customers in Canada, France, Germany, the U.S., and the UK.

The handset will cost $599 in the U.S., $699 in Canada, €649 in France and Germany, and £549 in the UK. These prices are for the unlocked, contract-free model. The unlocked BlackBerry Passport will also be available through Amazon, which is yet to announce pricing details. On-contract pricing, meanwhile, should be around US$250.

Check out BlackBerry's blog for more posts regarding the new Passport smartphone, or head here for more information on the handset's pricing and availability. To get a better idea about the device, meanwhile, check out the unboxing video below.