The same height and width as most international travel passports, the new smartphone, with its unusual square screen, is due to come out before Christmas in Australia.

It runs BlackBerry's latest operating system, BB10.3, which is slick, makes use of finger gestures, and is known for being secure.

You might think the 1:1 screen ratio screen -  4.5 inches (diagonal) - would be perfect for viewing Instagram photos but the photo-sharing app is one of the many missing from the two app stores available to the phone, BlackBerry World and the Amazon Appstore.

Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Snapchat, Uber, Secret and Dropbox's email app Mailbox are also unavailable, although you can watch YouTube videos through the web browser.

BlackBerry's partnership with Amazon gives BB10.3 users access to about 240,000 Android apps.

BlackBerry World, built specifically for the phone, claims some 235,000.

The phone can download Spotify, LIFX (for controlling internet-connected light-bulbs), Shazam, TENplay, Foursquare, Tinder, Evernote, Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn, although I did find some glitches while using Facebook, like photos friends posted in comment threads not showing. Glitches were also apparent in LIFX, with the screen not formatting images and text properly.

I also tried downloading the password manager app 1Password, which I use to store all my passwords, but couldn't get it to sync my file using Dropbox. It just got stuck in a disappointing loop when trying to set it up.

When it came to using the physical keyboard — which doubles as a cursor and a scroll — I found it a lot slower than using an iPhone 6 with either the default virtual on-screen keyboard enabled or SwiftKey.

The physical keyboard also makes one-handed use of the Passport near-impossible. Although it has some cool features, like backlit keys for use in the dark, the awkward and frankly bizarre shape of the phone does away with some of the physical keys on previous BlackBerry phones, meaning you find yourself constantly switching between using the physical keyboard and an on-screen option for special characters.

But the phone does have a few redeeming features. One of them is the Hub, which consolidates all of your tweets, Facebook messages, text messages, email, voicemail and so on into the one place for easy viewing.

I really enjoyed the Hub, although I found it gave me too much detail at times, especially on one day last week when I had more than 400 different types of responses from my Twitter following. Not only did it list individual Twitter replies as individual line items, which is to be expected, but it also listed individual followers favouriting my tweets as single items to view, whereas the Twitter app condenses multiple favourites into one line, saving you time when viewing responses.

Also annoying was the Hub not instantly showing pictures of my Twitter followers. To see their pictures you have to click through, and if it's a retweet you can't see their image at all.

I found the inbuilt 13 megapixel back-facing camera very good. I was able to zoom into shots to see great detail. The 2 megapixel front-facing camera is OK but not the best.

The default mapping app works satisfactorily, but when I searched for Fairfax Media's Sydney address the first result was one where the company used to be seven years ago. The second was correct.

"Docs To Go" is also going to be an app many business people will love for accessing Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. Combined with the Passport's wide screen, BlackBerry believes this will be one of its main selling points, allowing more data to be seen on the screen at any one time than any other smartphone.

Blend is also a nifty piece of software that enterprises are going to love, which enables users to access their phone's main features on a desktop or laptop computer, even if they left their phone at home.

Get a text or email on your phone? You can answer it with Blend on a laptop. You can also use Blend to browse files and web pages on your company's internal network. But you can't use it to take calls, which Apple's iOS 8 will allow for soon with desktops.

Overall, the Passport feels solid in your hand (it weighs 196 grams) and the 3450 mAh battery results in it having great battery life (BlackBerry says it should last 30 hours but I found it lasted two days). Compared to the iPhone, that's stunning.

The fact its storage capacity can be upgraded to 128GB with an SD card is an added bonus.

It's also super fast, with its 2.2GHz processor and 3GB of RAM. I would recommend it primarily for business users and not consumers. This is because of the lack of consumer-friendly apps.

It's a very productivity-focused phone, and while many consumers may want to be productive, they'd rather be "productive" using popular apps likes Secret or Snapchat.

BlackBerry is hoping for a comeback with the Passport. Whether it is enough to boost BlackBerry's estimated 0.5 per cent Australian operating system market share into double digit territory remains to be seen.

Optus Business will stock  the Passport and pricing and availability is expected to be announced soon. An outright price for Australia has not yet been announced.