Why I Prefer The Blackberry Passport Over My iPhone 6

I received my Apple iPhone 6 the first day it was released in September, and my Blackberry Passport in late October. When I first got the iPhone I assumed that I would choose it as my primary phone. I was wrong. After more than a month with the Blackberry, it has become my primary smartphone.
Like many of us, I started with a Blackberry back in 1998 when they were email-only devices. As Blackberry released smarter and more capable devices I, like millions of others, would get the newest phone until their foray into touch screens about six years ago. Verizon released the Storm and I used it for about a year until I had had enough of its problems, both hardware and software, and very reluctantly abandoned Blackberry and switched to an Android. At that time, most of us believed there was only one phone, and that was a Blackberry. We were obviously wrong, as the iPhone and then Android virtually evaporated Blackberry’s market share in North America.  A series of management decisions at Blackberry did not help, nor did their second disaster, the Playbook, of which I was quite critical.
When the iPhone 4S was released I switched and have never gone back. So it was a real surprise when I received the new Blackberry Passport and discovered that the company that was once the dominant leader of smartphones worldwide had come back with a sophisticated, rugged and highly intelligent phone that is capable of meeting the needs of serious professional users.
Like many of us, I carry two smartphones: one on Verizon and the other on T-Mobile because of my extensive international travel. I use Verizon for U.S. service; their extensive network coverage works everywhere. T-Mobile is my international carrier because of their incredibly low foreign roaming rates that no United States carrier will compete with.
My initial take on the iPhone 6 was both positive and negative. On the plus side, the 4.7″ screen was slightly larger than that of my iPhone 5S, but not quite the now-accepted standard of five inches. I opted for the iPhone 6 because the 6 Plus, which has a generous 5.5″ screen, was too large to comfortably carry. The 6 is a gorgeous piece of hardware, but was too thin and can be hard to hold because of its rounded corners. It also gets way too hot in certain operating modes. The obsession in smartphone design with thinness I do not understand. Yes, it looks cool, but so what? I prefer the 5S.
There is no question that the Apple iPhone 6 is another huge success in terms of sales, but for what market segment? In my view, and especially after using the Blackberry Passport, the iPhone is aimed at consumers, not designed for businesses or secure government work even though it has found its way into these sectors.
When the phone was first introduced, Tim Cook said that Apple was all about privacy and security. There are a lot of reasons that Apple (and Google) have implemented hardware and software changes to protect the privacy of their users and make their phones more secure. In my view there are two primary reasons for this new emphasis on your security: the companies have had enough of government demands, often secret, for customer data, so they opted for the customer to take the entire issue out of their hands by encrypting all of the information.
But compared to Blackberry they are late in the game by several years. Security was one of the fundamental design parameters for every Blackberry device, which is why businesses and virtually every government around the world trusted them for their most sensitive communications.