BlackBerry Passport should come with Snapdragon 801 chip

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BlackBerry Passport

I personally can’t wait to play with the BlackBerry Passport, but even before I touch it I can’t help but think that the Canadian company should’ve opted for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 rather than Snapdragon 800 chip. The S801 is part of the same family of chips with slightly faster cores and improved GPU. With Snapdragon 801, BlackBerry would’ve created a more future-proof device that would keep performance for longer times.

When Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 801, it said the following:

Any design intended for the Snapdragon 800 should be able to use the 801 without any extra work. It’s got four CPU cores based on the 32-bit Krait 400 architecture, an Adreno 330 GPU, integrated 150Mbps LTE and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and the same variant of TSMC’s 28nm process. Qualcomm has also added eMMC 5.0 support, which should boost maximum storage performance compared to the 800’s eMMC 4.5.

In other words, a little to no extra work is required to use Snapdragon 801 instead of Snapdragon 800, yet the performance gains are visible.

That being said, I’ve no doubts that even the Snapdragon 800-powered Passport will be super-fast. Alas, it would be better if it was Snapdragon 801 ticking under the hood. Said chip is powering most of today’s top phones, including the HTC One M8, Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3 and Sony Xperia Z2. Moreover, we expect a new series of devices rocking the Snapdragon 805 to hit the stores within few weeks, and before you know it, the Passport’s specs sheet will look outdated. That’s kinda said, when you think about it, no matter how “pure specs” are irrelevant for the user experience…

So what do you think? Do you think it’s sad that BlackBerry opted for Snapdragon 800 instead of Snapdragon 801?

  • Tee Jay

    The BBPP2 will have the 805.

    • Steve

      There is no information about a Passport 2 so what makes you think it exists? lol

  • PeterSteinbeck

    BBPP2 may have the 805 but at that time most phones will be using the 64-bit 810… But I want the Passport nevertheless.

    • Steve

      lol Who told you there is going to be a Passport 2?

  • charlie2010

    The chip is irrelevent, the BB10 OS has 20x less code than iOS and Android so it runs far faster, those bloated dinosaurs need all the horse power they can get just to be bearable.

    • 73% of statistics are made up

      But everyone knows that it’s power efficiency is 60x worse (we can all pull numbers out of our asses mate!)

      • AlexB

        and you know that how? complete BS!!!
        I own Z10, Q10, and iPhone 5… iPhone by far has THE WORST battery life amongst them all, followed by Z10, and then Q10 is ridiculously long lasting.
        QNX is a very very efficient OS, is the #1 OS for running car’s communication and redundancy situations and hence doesn’t need as much CPU!

        • osama

          dafaq you talking about, I had a z10 now a z30, the z10 is garbage, worst battery life ever, q10 is amazing, z30 lasts for 9-12 hours, don’t be a fanboy mate, don’t lie. and the z30 had 2 year old specs when it came out, that’s why it always lags and drops in frame rate, with its potato camera. bb10 is great, but its far from amazing, don’t compare a 1 year old operating system to one that’s been here since the beginning of the smartphone industry

          • AlexB

            Iphone 5 battery life is WORSE than Z10. I said iphone 5 followed by Z10 and then Q10 is amazing. So it was all correct.

            Btw, Z10 specs when it’s came out was not old actually had better spec then iPhone and better resolution

      • charlie2010

        Do you seriously expect us to believe iOS lasts longer than a BB10 phone? Check out the samsung adds on ‘wall huggers’.

  • Nate650

    This probably won’t matter in the grand scheme of things. BlackBerry needs to wow with this phone. I’m cautiously optimistic.

  • S?RGI?

    We are not sure if it’s the 800 one, that Snapdragon model MSM8974-AA could be v2 or v3 and depending of that would be 800 or 801 so I guess we will have to wait for the official specs sheet

  • AlexB

    Nope! Who cares anyways?

    This spec race is completely ridiculous IMO… iPhones always had lower spec CPUs than Androids and ran a lot faster as they were optimized, same goes for Win8 phones that can run on a lot less CPU… QNX on BB10 doesn’t need as much horsepower as Android variants, and hence there’s no need to bump-up the CPU for good performance. Unfortunately, to satisfy folks like the poster and masses they have to put the BIG CPU to get attraction, which they have.

    KEYS for this phone are, #1 Amazing screen resolution/size, #2 Amazing Battery life (probably #1 in market), #3 Amazing keyboard/trackpad combo, #4 Running Amazon/Android apps out of the box. To me, that’s a winning combination. They just need much better marketing, and less biased reviews to make this a huge success.

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