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.
Blackberry please come back.
they died because they were shit. No apps.
Without AI please.
Yes, please!
The Titan 2 Elite looks awesome though it appears to be just a render right now. I was looking at the original Titan a while back but it was pretty dated even then. Gonna keep an eye out for the Elite.
The phone will come powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor, have 12GB of RAM, and 512GB of internal storage. There is no word on the display or the battery, but going by the previous release, it should be an AMOLED screen, and the battery should be 5,000mAh. Neither is there any word about the release timeline, pricing, or other features of the device right now. The sole official render of the phone suggests a sleeker-looking body, erringly similar to the Clicks Communicator.
My only worry with Unihertz is update frequency and length. Everything else I like.
I don’t get it. On screen is fine
Same here. I get the nostalgia factor, and that tactile buttons can feel nice, but other than that I feel like it’s just a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t necessarily work well.
Instead of a quick tap, you have to actually press on each button, which slows down typing. You can’t resize, recolor, or reformat your keyboard to fit your needs better, there’s no split keyboard functionality for landscape mode, etc.
Plus it’s just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.
Never had any of my phones with keyboards have a mechanical failure. I can type blindly on a physical keyboard, not so with an OSD one. Does the tap register? Does it predict into the right word? Who knows.
I can blindly type with an on screen keyboard, it’s not that hard. What’s wrong with your phone where taps aren’t registering? And poor text prediction would be the same on physical vs on screen KB.
My old Pantrch Duo would frequently ignore physical key presses where it tactically clicked, but failed to actually bottom out enough to register. And I have that issue all the time with mechanical keyboards where the tactile bump happens before the key actually gets registered. Not an issue for typing, but for gaming I do it often.
I can blindly type with an on screen keyboard, it’s not that hard
You can type a full actual sentence on an OSD keyboard including punctuation without looking at it?
Yeah. It’s not that hard.
I just did with that.
Also what are you typing blindly where punctuation actually matters?
Plus it’s just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.
Good thing this has been solved for years now. It’s not like keyboards are a new invention.
…for you. Can you concede that maybe someone else might not like it?
Sure I’m even happy to have hardware diversity
Same. This hardware keyboard is taking up potential screen real-estate.
If you want a hardware keyboard, just use a bluetooth one, you can get folding ones which fold up pretty small.
It’s all about tactile feedback for me.
Two decades later and I still miss my Blackberry keyboard.
I played with the Chinese Zinwa Q25 last year and it sooo felt like a Blackberry. Too bad the Q25 was plagued with issues or I would have bought one.
I’m glad you mentioned the bugs. I was slowly leaning towards it but I’ve done my fair bit of… “unpaid beta testing” for one lifetime.
I miss my BlackBerry phones. The Titan range was cool but buggy as well. If they could just do a Nothing phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I would literally buy one overnight.
I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.
just plain boredom with glass slabs
This. So much this. They’re all boring, too tall, too skinny rectangles with as much personality as a used up dryer sheet.
6 🤷♂️ 7
I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone
You managed to get one? The website says they ship in 3-5 business days. I ordered in November, and this week I canceled the order because all they’ve done so far is lie to me about ship dates. Terrible, terrible experience.
I would highly suggest you and anyone else wanting a keyboard that’s actually useful to check out Unexpected Keyboard. You can write code with this thing without it being a nightmare.
I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.
It’s like they’re designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop.
It is because they are exactly that.
There exist palmtops and handheld computers. I have a Gemini PDA running Sailfish OS Linux and it feels very different - like a small, cat-sized laptop. No problem running ssh or vim or ledger on it, or self-written guile apps, or cross-compiled Rust CLI tools. It is a computer, not a consumption device.
Gemini PDA
Is that the one from PlanetCom? I’ve been looking at both their Gemini and Cosmo Communicator. Both were out of stock when I ended up going with the Minimal.
Yes. One good option now might be PocketBook or so. New devices are popping up, the technology is there.
Kinda wanted to do something similar with the Pine Phone + Keyboard, but I can’t seem to find the right OS/distro for the task.
Hell yes - as long as it still fits in my pocket. That was a prolem with some of the later Blackberry models.
The Passport was actually a really decent phone but the jokes did get old.
“When are you going to wall-mount your phone?”
“fucking hell that will kill someone if you drop it”
“you don’t need to send that text, that person can fucking read it from here!”
etc etc etc
The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.
apple keyboards have never made sense to me
yes, I am an android user. I’ve had an iPad for years. I hate the keyboard.
This might be a silly question, but in what ways did it get worse? Is it the size of the keyboard changing, the predictions not being as good anymore or something else?
With my knowledge of tech companies, I’m not exactly surprised, but I’m not an iPhone user and struggling to understand how a keyboard of all things could get worse.
IME in the past few months the swiping word-predictions have gotten markedly worse — it makes me wonder if there’s more “phoning home” going on (input data being sent back) or perhaps AI analysis being crammed in. I have no verification on this though.
I’ve always had that shit disabled. It never really worked well for me. I have all predicative crap turned off besides basic auto correct.
So many features like this have gotten so much worse over the years. Google assistant is the big stand out one for me. I first switched to Android in 2014ish, and I got heavily into tinkering and automating stuff. I could say “Okay Google, make a coffee”, or “pop a coffee on please”, and Google assistant would hear this, parse it and understand that this wasn’t a command it knew. This would lead to that input being passed over to Tasker, the app I used for automating stuff, and that would then do the behind the scenes magic of turning on the coffee brewer as I was on my way home (It was very funny, because I didn’t have a fancy smart coffee pot or anything — I just used a ball bearing on a track to hit the on button)
Nowadays, I say something simple like “Okay Google, make a note” and it will say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that” more often than not. The speech recognition used to be so good, especially after training it on your voice for a while. Now it’s just shit.
It makes me disproportionately sad. Like, enshittification is everywhere, but this is something distinct, even if it is linked to enshittification. If they were gating better voice recognition behind paywalls, I’d be annoyed, but much less sad, because at least that functionality still exists. Modern software, especially that produced by the tech giants, has gotten so complex that I wonder whether even the most proficient engineers in Google understand their software nowadays.
I remember it being cold, gloves on, phone in the bag, I forgot to navigate with maps via public transport. No bother, earphones are in, I can summon Google assistant or so I thought I tried asking for navigation and instead Gemini showed up and started trying to give me directions that it was hallucinating on the spot
Why did the predictions get so bad? SwiftKey used to be amazing until Microshits got their dirty hands on it. I mean, it’s to be expected, but I’d like a more technical breakdown.
I’m so for this – The stagnation in the smartphone industry has left me hungry, and a month ago I bought a nice flip phone, which I’ve been using for the last month. I would totally buy something like this too!
I used to pine for this. I loved my physical keyboard on the Treo and Palm Pre. I didn’t keep it long, but I even rocked a Moto Photon Q for a bit.
Then I found swipe typing and will never go back. It is SO much faster
omfg yes please I would actually buy a brand new phone again for that
I fucking hate entirely touchscreen stuff. using a sheets app on a touchscreen phone takes 10x as long as it should
You can find bluetooth keyboards that work just fine on a phone. The hard part is finding a good small one.
not very convenient to use in a grocery store, though
Why are you typing anything in a grocery store? Type in the kitchen when you need to add something to the list, but in the store it should be just checking off the items as you put them in the cart. Maybe you have a good reason, but it feels like you are solving the wrong problem. [insert long rant about usability and human-machine interaction]
If you really need a keyboards I agree bluetooth keyboards are chunky. I often use a 60% keyboard with my phone, but it is a lot larger than my fine despite being a small keyboard. There is no getting around the size of hands though, you can’t make a good tiny keyboard (even a 40% won’t fit in your pocket).
2 phones are not a trend, nice try tho
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.
Honestly, I just want something actually functional that’s not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.
I’m really starting to feel like Android 11 is the “Windows 7” of Android.
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.
Fuck them for mocking actual useful features and freedom of choice while simping for stupid shit like AI and enshittified tech from all the usual suspects.
I’m intrigued by the Titan 2 Elite. Never owned a Blackberry myself (or never used one as my main rather) and I do type a lot on my phone so it would be an interesting experience to try the Titan. Looks quite nice as well. The Communicator looks good, too, but I’d rather go with a brand that has a history of making phones, rather than cases.
I heard that Unihertz isn’t exactly the best at supporting their phones, though, and I’m not a big fan of Mediatek either.
