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.
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.
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
Qwerty flip phone and I’m in… But no foldable screen bullshit.
Also give back the fucking aux output.
input? why would you want to play audio from your phone?
Fixed, brain not braining good.
Also I swear I tried at least once but I can’t remember why right 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.
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.
Blackberry please come back.
Without AI please.
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.
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.
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!
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…
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.
ahhh I loved this thing
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?
Yes. This. I second this.
2 phones are not a trend, nice try tho
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).
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.
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.
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?
Agreed. I miss Minuum keyboard.
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
I love my 100% keyboard with white backlighting. Was hard to find a decent premade one but I did some years ago.
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.
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
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
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
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’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 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
I’d buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.
