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.
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.
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.
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
Oooooh
The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside
I miss my Blackberry Pearl…
I fear that that design of phone layout/UI will never make a comeback.
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
Droid CEO here.
No.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
These small keyboars are very bad and just really horrible when using. At least in my experience.
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’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, 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.
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.
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.
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 PocketPC or so. Look for “Palmtops”/“Handheld PCs”. New devices are popping up, the technology is there.
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 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.
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.
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
