So today I’m going to cover off my views on the BlackBerry Assistant and music app and audio.

One thing I will say is BlackBerry has not produced a lacking device in terms of hardware. NFC. Miracast. DLNA. Powerful built in speakers and a quad microphone system. The Passport features a “Natural Sound Technology” which adapts Wi-Fi and cellular call sound depending on phone position and background noise. In my phone call tests, my friends at the other end of the call were impressed by the clarity. I even tried making a call on a windy Dartmoor. Same clear call.

So above you can see me calling my pet monster. And once you have created an action to a person, it shows that action again to help speed up calling that person again as shown below.

If you tap the “i” for information, you get a list of all the options available. I ought to mention the BlackBerry Assistant is called up with a press on the button on the side, which sits in between the volume up and down keys. If you decide not to use the assistant you can remap it in settings to be a mute switch.

As you can see there is a good selection of options available, and in my testing so far the BlackBerry Assistant was fairly accurate with the results.

However, there is one aspect of the BlackBerry Assistant that blew me away. It is all very well testing the voice recognition in a quiet room, but I then tried it in the loud noisy environment and it was still able to pick up everything I had said. Truly remarkable.

So moving on to the music app. My only gripe or wish was that the albums art could be displayed in a grid view like the Gallery app with the folder view. Otherwise, it is a no nonsense app.

I did not realise there was a FM radio, but I found this in the app options as shown below.

And as you can see I have a few radio stations setup.

But with all the options, the only thing that really matters is the audio quality. One word. Excellent. Really good via headphones whether connected via a wire or via bluetooth. The Loudspeaker is loud and effective too. FLAC support is natively supported and iOS Headphone controls work with the Passport!

More tomorrow.