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- cross-posted to:
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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…
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.
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.
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
Oooooh
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.
While we’re at it, can I have back the mini trrackball with integrated notification LED from my HTC Hero?
And my removable battery, expandable storage, and IR blaster please.
Ah my old Ipaq was so much fun at sports bars…
It’s not exactly the same but the Clicks phone keyboard is touch sensitive so you can swipe on the keyboard, and the button on the side has a notification LED
so does the titan 2 and titan pocket, i have them both
How is text editing?
i will be honest, the Pocket is not suited for heavy writing or anything, it is geared toward people who want their phone to be a phone while still being able to use it for some things like NFC, etc (my reason for getting it). the Titan 2 is more like a small phablet with a keyboard and has the ability to program each key to do a function which i love.
the writing on the titan 2 is more intuitive and you can double tap the space bar to enter cursor mode so you can swipe the keypad to move it around. this is a function i want on my Pocket, it makes everything easier. be prepared for a lot of comments in public, people are obsessed with it lol
Nexus one had the trackball, the hero had a sensor or did both? IDK it’s been some years since I still had my nexus one. Maybe I’m thinking of the HTC Desire with the sensor.
I do remember running the original version(s) of MIUI on my nexus one, ahh simpler times.
I had a Nexus that I got as a hand me down. It had a ball with customizable colors
The next one I had after that had an led you could customize for different types of notifications
Yeah the LEDs were always handy to have, and the coloured notifications on the trackball (nexus 1) with a third party app was super cool at the time. My trackball after a few years got pretty dirty and didn’t want to clean with chemicals in fear of damaging it.
Currently using a Nothing (3) which is somewhat similar with the small led display on the back.
I still have it around somewhere in hopes I can fix it
When I got it, my family said it didn’t work, it had some weird error. I charged it and turned it on so they were like “sure you can have it”
It was my first smartphone,. actually, and I used it for quite a while until it died again. I don’t remember the error, but it was basically bricked and I couldn’t factory reset it via the phone menu. I had a very young child and trying to figure out the android sdk for a computer to fiddle that out was too taxing for me
I really liked that phone for sure. I’m sure it’s a lot of nostalgia, but I miss the older simpler phones. Much easier to handle, too.
I’ve currently just been using every couple generations of the Xa model. This one’s a pixel 7a, last was a 4a which the child has now. It’s got severe battery life issues after that update recently but I haven’t looked into it too hard. Been wanting to look for some alternatives and I’m leaning towards something unconventional, at least by today’s standards. I checked out that phone and it really looks good, both aesthetically and specs wise
ahhh I loved this thing
Yes. This. I second this.
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
Droid CEO here.
No.
God i hope so
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
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.
Hey, finally some things that aren’t exactly the same as everything else.
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.
The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.
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.
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’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
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.
I remember the iPhone keyboard being an embedded part of the OS so you couldn’t swap it out for a better one. But what exactly is bad about it?
Agreed. I miss Minuum keyboard.
The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside
