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.
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
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.
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.
Honestly, I just want something actually functional that’s not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
6 🤷♂️ 7
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.
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.
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.
I’d buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.
Last time I checked, none of these have display out, the only thing I kinda need. Sucks to not have it…
