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.
That looks really interesting. I’d like to know if the boot loader is locked.