QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year
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.
https://gizmodo.com/qwerty-phones-are-really-trying-to-make-a-comeback-this-year-2000709717Open linkView original on startrek.website452
Comments173
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.
This. So much this. They're all boring, too tall, and too skinny with about as much personality as a used up dryer sheet. It's like they're designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop. I remember being able to actually do things on my older smartphones (RDP, SSH, editing documents/spreadsheets, etc). You can still do those things now, but you basically have to break out a bluetooth keyboard to do anything more than the most basic things and it feels like trying to look at a panorama through a keyhole.
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.
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.
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 PocketPC or so. Look for "Palmtops"/"Handheld PCs". New devices are popping up, the technology is there.
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.
https://f-droid.org/packages/juloo.keyboard2
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 pre-ordered last June and got it toward the end of July. It seems to ship directly from the factory in Hong Kong, so you have to use the tracking link they send you until it clears customs in your country.
I did a first impressions post about it when I got it.
6 🤷♂️ 7
Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.
All this bullshit about phones with folding screens nowadays when what I really want is a phone with a folding mechanical 104-key :P
Would also erase the need for the atrocious spellcheck. Few minutes ago I wanted to write „random“ it got changed to „ransom“ and when I changed it again I wrote “randon“ by accident.
We've collectively probably lost years, if not a decade of our human lives just trying to fix autocorrect fuck ups.
Let it fold: one half holds the landscape screen, and across the lengthwise hinge is space for a wonderful keyboard. Let it be a phone-phone when it's clammed up and you still have space for Qi and a 3.5mm. BLISS
I love my 100% keyboard with white backlighting. Was hard to find a decent premade one but I did some years ago.
That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?
Writing is okish, editing however is horrendous.
I wonder how this will be with cursor navigation, though.
Gboard has a text editor mode built in, but you have to dig a bit to enable it which makes it feel more pointless
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.
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
Yes. This. I second this.
ahhh I loved this thing
I'd buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.
QWERTY phones are fine and all, and they work well for English, but sometimes I type with this, and I’m sure as hell not gonna use a slow-ass QWERTY replacement.
The Japanese ten-key on a touch screen is so good because you can swipe. It makes me cringe when people tap give times to get お like we used to on physical number pads.
God, I don’t miss that. Honestly, I wish there was an English ten-key equivalent.
Nothing stops you. The app is open-source, so you can add T9 swipe typing yourself.
iOS stops me pretty quick. But maybe I can explore a bit?
An unexpected obstacle! I kinda assumed that everyone in technology community would use an Android phone with a dark theme and a Linux emulator app.
I ended up using my phone as my main gaming console for a long time, so I’m reluctant to abandon my gaming library now. :(
On Android we have five year old games disappearing from Play Store, including games you've previously bought, because Google cannot be assed to support older Android versions.
I thought it autopredicted? At least that's what the Chinese one does
Having to use something like Windows IME on a phone for Japanese is nightmare fuel
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
I played with the Chinese Zinwa Q25 last year and it sooo felt like a Blackberry. Too bad the Q25 is plagued with issues or I would have bought one.
Almost two decades later and I still miss my Blackberry keyboard.
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.
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.
Agreed. I miss Minuum 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?
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.
I don't think they are - if they were we'd be seeing models from the likes of Samsung or Huawei.
Its good clickbait for gizmodo though.
It looks like we're getting decent options now? Like the Clicks one is designed in cooperation with a former Blackberry designer. From what I see on Reddit, BB Key2 from 2018 was the last good option in this space, so I understand the excitement.
God i hope so
Blackberry please come back.
Without AI please.
they died because they were shit. No apps.
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.
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
Droid CEO here.
No.
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).
Because my wife is serially texting me additional things and þey aren't all at þe same store so I need to get þem into þe shopping list app?
Because someþing I saw reminded me of someþing I need to do and I need to write it down or I'll forget?
Because I want to price compare something against what I can get it for online or from anoþer store?
Because I run into someone and need to create a new contact wiþ þeir information?
Why aren't you typing þings at þev store?
because we have a spreadsheet for group trips and I'm checking off the items I bought
why would I want to do that on a separate list and then transfer that information to the spreadsheet afterwards, when I could just do it directly?
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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to get my hands on one. There's a few apps that I still want a smart phone for like email, navigation, Garmin Connect. This would be awesome.
But mark my words, the Clicks Communicator will be a piece of shit.
This is a smartphone. Basically just an android device with a keyboard
oh, no way
It doesn't seem to really compromise on much apart from screenspace except maybe the camera? With a single yet high res sensor.
We don't know what chip it has either, nor what the waterproofing is like.
I don't think it'll be shit, but they don't talk about RAM at all while revealing all other specs. Given current RAM pricing it seems like they're still trying to make a good deal on that, which will ultimately decide how much RAM customers get. It probably won't be a lot.
Unihertz put in 12GB into the Titan 2, good luck trying to match that now.
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.
Hey, finally some things that aren't exactly the same as everything else.
I miss my old Motorola Droid 2. I don't need a thinner phone, give me that slider form factor.
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.
I'm tempted to give it a go but I exclusively type using swipe gestures on my phone so I'm not sure that's a learning curve I want to commit to.
There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it's a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.
I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry's dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I've always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.
There's something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it's that they're happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.
I'll care when they're Dvorak phones /s
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.
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.
My only worry with Unihertz is update frequency and length. Everything else I like.
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.
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.
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.
Im personally typing this from my clicks for pixel :3
If it wasn't $139 I'd consider it. Ngl, even $39 seems excessively expensive...
To be fair that's literally all qwerty keyboard phones, the only difference is my expensive keyboard is attached to a proper phone with decent software support (also yeah its expensive but compared to what, nobody else sells anything similar).
input? why would you want to play audio from your phone?
A QWERTY flip phone would actually be sweet. Are there any examples from history, from the era when phones were fun?
Usually not flip, slide was pretty common though
It also wasn't common but there was a Samsung Folder which was a flip phone and a Motorola Flipout which was a swivel phone. My point is, you could buy all kinds of wacky devices.
HTC Desire Z had swinging action which was pretty slick. Grit couldn't get stuck in those sliders and it snapped open with a satisfying clack.
Check out Sidephone.
Yeah this is something I need since my fingers don’t always register on touch screens.
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 🤷♂️
You can change remapping, and it's basically next best thing
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
Source
Looks pretty pocketable (and gorgeous) to me.
I was a huge 'tactical keyboard on phone' kinda guy. Then I got acclimated to Swype. I don't think I could ever go back but think choice is good.
Swipe was acquired by Microsoft, if you wanted a reason to go back :)
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.
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!
the Voyager and enV style phones with the touchscreen in front and flip to open to qwerty keyboard really gave the best of the worlds
I had the LG Genesis that was the spiritual successor to the enV. Loved the form factor but the battery life was abysmal at like 2 hours of use. Yay Android 2.2 lol.
Hopefully firefox and the like will start putting spellcheck in their mobile applications again. I got mad at auto correct because it was worse than my spelling (at least you can guess what I meant - auto correct often changed to the wrong word: you wouldn't think to I might mean something else). I also often use a bluetooth keyboard, again spell check is needed.
The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside
Gizmodo didn't always look like the penny arcade website, did they?
Great now I can't unsee it.
I miss my Blackberry Pearl...
I fear that that design of phone layout/UI will never make a comeback.
Do software keyboards not use the QWERTY layout? Why are we calling hardware keyboards on a phone a QWERTY phone?!
Because there still are 12-button numerical keyboard phones with T9 text input.
Texting on my old stratosphere was so much better than the modern keyboards. I wouldn't mind an updated version.
Dvorak phone when? Preferably with compose key in place of caps lock, but it's not vital.
And for fucks sake, give us an ISO option. I'm not claiming one is superior over the other, but most of the world have used ISO their entire lives and absolutely detest ANSI.
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.
I heard that Unihertz isn't exactly the best at supporting their phones, though, and I'm not a big fan of Mediatek either. The Communicator looks good, too, but I'd rather go with a brand that has a history of making phones, rather than cases.
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
What about a teensy Bluetooth keyboard?
The use of that kind of device is sort of over no? I was resistant with my Blackberry for a long time, but “phones” have changed from typing to passive input.
The reason I'm a Clicks convert isn't the typing. I only use the keyboard for that half the time. The reason is it opens up keyboard shortcuts which make the ordinarily horrible experience of doing anything on a smartphone much better.
Yeah, small devices are always going to be awkward to type on.
still far better than touchscreens. I used a blackberry keyone for a while, and it was amazing, until I lost it on a walk in the park years ago.
I do wonder what would be more annoying though: An on-screen keyboard or a weird stubby aspect ratio that doesn't play nice with all your other apps.
Especially when you can already get a keyboard case for a regular phone and have the best of both worlds.
I don't get it. On screen is fine
.....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.
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.
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?
Good thing this has been solved for years now. It's not like keyboards are a new invention.
It's all about tactile feedback for me.
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.
Last time I checked, none of these have display out, the only thing I kinda need. Sucks to not have it...
2 phones are not a trend, nice try tho
I assume every single one is a low quality cash grab