- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year.
Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.
At CES 2026:
- Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad
- Unihertz also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.
[T]wo QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.
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Last time I checked, none of these have display out, the only thing I kinda need. Sucks to not have it…
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
Oooooh
Fuck do I miss my first gen Droid. A physical slide out keyboard that was also a switch between portrait and landscape view. I hate auto gyro rotation with a passion.
It’s amazing how homogenized phones became: Apple or Google flavoured slabs with a 6" or 6.5" display. That’s starting to change with foldable displays and it looks like 2026 might be a comeback year for hardware keyboards, so I’m optimistic about mobile devices being more than just social media consumption machines.
Fifteen years ago you could get portrait sliders and landscape sliders and flip phones and BlackBerry style phones and phones that had game controls, and 4" slabs and 6" slabs (called “phablets” back then). There was so much more choice and it was so much more fun. Five years ago you couldn’t even get a modern phone that’s less than 6" so it fits easily in your pocket.
Algorithmic flattening in action.
I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn’t have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don’t think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.
A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM’s servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you’d made a one-line change to your code.
RIP RIM, but I’d like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.
I’d love to see the keyboards and trackballs manufactured again if for no other purpose than having them available for other projects.
There was a project a while back called Beepberry that was a little handheld Linux thing that used Blackberry keyboards. Among other reasons, the supply of the Blackberry keyboards dried up so the project died.
hackberry pi alive and well
God i hope so
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
Droid CEO here.
No.
The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2
They just had to announce it after I ordered the one with all the “bizarre” gimmicks.
Don’t feel bad or at least don’t feel alone. Such is generally my luck too.
Instead of ever-bigger screens thanks to flip open folding displays, how about the same size phone that flips open to an easily usable qwerty board?
One thing has become abundantly clear: You, me, and so many others in the comments here need to be in charge of phone design and not whoever’s been doing it for the last 10 years.
I just want Starks phone in the first Iron Man movie (I don’t think it was ever a real product) but as a modern smart phone.
Y’all are allowed to hot glue a Bluetooth keyboard to the back of your phone you know.
Jokes aside, I wonder why there aren’t more protective cases with a built in sliding keyboard for phones. Would be cool.
The minimal phone looks like a brick and I understand why the e-ink is a choice that forces you to not use your phone as much but I’m not ready.
Because there’s no market for it. The fact they don’t sell cases with keyboards while they do sell things like backbone makes it incredibly clear not many actually want this. Swipe typing is very fast once you’re good at it.
It’s either that, or companies are incredibly scared of not getting as much money as they predicted, so they don’t do products that aren’t copies of another, already existing products.
I see. It’s like the people wanting small phones. “We are a market” the twelve of them say repeatedly.
The market for small phones that last a long time is quite sizable. Which doesn’t matter because they don’t want to buy a lot of phones. It’s like Google. Years before Gemini, they made their search engine worse on purpose because it makes more money. Search twice, get served twice the ads. Nobody outside of the company has ever wanted Search But Worse. There is zero desire for Worse. But as long as Google is free to make purely economic decisions, there is no reason for them to revert to Search But We Make Less Money.
Hey, finally some things that aren’t exactly the same as everything else.
Needs Signal as well as LoRa /mesh
I’d be all over it then.
Except I find MrMobile weird.
It’s just an Android phone, so yeah, it’ll have Signal.
The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside
I got the Unihertz Titan 2 in December and I absolutely love it. 12GB of RAM are amazing. The camera isn’t good, I hope they’ll improve that with the next model.
Clicks is very quiet about the amount of RAM in their device, it seems like they haven’t finalized that yet. Given current RAM pricing, I fear a 6GB model coming… :(
They said 8GB in one of their CES interviews.
Oh, I also ordered one in December, waiting for arrival still. Glad you liked it, it gives me hopes. Are you finding it’s squareness to be an issue?
It’s pretty heavy which was weird for the first few days, but I got used to it. At first, it was a bit hard to hold that heavy brick in my hands and reach the keyboard on the bottom without losing my balance, but now I don’t have a problem with it anymore. And I notice now that I can start typing blindly more and more, which is super cool.
The OLED screen on the back is a gimmick I rarely use. But I really like that the device sits flat on a surface if you put it into the official case. There’s no camera bump tilting it at an angle, like so many modern smartphones do.
Be aware that they use old BlackBerry screens, which have been sitting in a warehouse for years. They have great resolution, but some of them started to delaminate at the edges and that looks like stains on your screen. I got lucky and my screen is pretty good, but other people got really messed up screens. Unihertz is not handling those issues well, it seems, only offering a free case or very low discounts.
And for now, there has only been one small software update. No security updates at all. They released initial software for early reviewers, then one update for the Kickstarter backers and a bugfix. That’s it.
They have promised one more major Android release, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’ll be their final update, to be honest.
Unihertz is not handling those issues well
The post messed up with my delivery and it returned back to them, and Unihertz asked me for additional 20 bucks so they resend it. I am pretty sure, if they handle this in this manner, the other issues are not better.
I loved my Passport but the Titan 2 just looked frumpy in a way that the Passport didn’t. It’s not looks that keeps me from buying it though; it’s the complete lack of security updates which would prevent me from using it for work. Unihertz has promised better support starting with Titan 2. If that turns out to be true, then the upcoming Titan Elite will be an attractive competitor to the Clicks Communicator, which has promised 5 years of security updates.
Might be an unpopular opinion but
In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.
By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called “phablets” a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I’m typing this right now on a touchscreen and it’s pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.
Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.
I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there’s not so much more left to perfect that form factor.
I doubt the wpm of the average physical keyboard user could ever be lower on average compared to the wpm of users of touchscreen keyboards.
That is to say, if we could somehow make a phone keyboard that was practical to use, but not so large that it defeats the portability of the device, imo, that would be the best.
I think you might be underestimating how some people type really slowly when given a full sized QWERTY keyboard, numpad and all.
Then again the one limiting factor of phone keyboards (touch or physical) is that they’re designed for two thumbs, instead of just whatever fingers happen to be closer to the button you want. Though I’ll admit I do miss when Nokia, BlackBerry, etc, came up with unique solutions for how to get a small physical keyboard attached to a phone.
