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.
People should look into the ikko mind one too. Its shit that they have so much emphasis on their “AI OS” which is just an integrated app (which can be requested to be removed before delivery or removed via adb). But the hardware looks solid.
Its a square screen phone that you can get a keyboard case for that includes a hifi dac. Its camera is a big sony sensor that can flip over to the front so they didn’t need to split the camera money between two or more sensors.
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
God i hope so
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.
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.
Hey, finally some things that aren’t exactly the same as everything else.
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.
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.
Yeah this is something I need since my fingers don’t always register on touch screens.
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.
Gizmodo didn’t always look like the penny arcade website, did they?
Where’s my Dvorak phone?
As tempting as that sounds, I can no longer touch-type on practically any other desktop. Give me a Dvorak phone, and I wont be able to thumb type either…
I’ve been using the Dvorak layout for typing and swiping on my phone for many years. It’s actually set to be multilingual, even: I can swipe either language or toggle to Azerty for French (I probably should switch to BÉPO, but I don’t think I have that option yet). I don’t tend to swap phones enough for that to be an issue, and I work remotely so I don’t have to use other workstations, so my use case is probably more suited to this.
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
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.
I see. It’s like the people wanting small phones. “We are a market” the twelve of them say repeatedly.
I actually have a usecase for virtual keyboards - being able to easily change the layout on-the-fly (which is obviously impossible with a physical one)
What do you mean by “changing the layout”, going from QWERTY to Dvorak, or something like switching between English and Chinese glyphs? Both are possible at least in software. Technically you can move around/replace keycaps to match your layout too, but obviously that would be super inconvenient to do regularly
Maybe he needs a steno keyboard for essays 🤷♂️
