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.
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.
Blackberry please come back.
2 phones are not a trend, nice try tho
Honestly, I just want something actually functional that’s not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.
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!
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.
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
While we’re at it, can I have back the mini trrackball with integrated notification LED from my HTC Hero?
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.
And my removable battery, expandable storage, and IR blaster please.
Ah my old Ipaq was so much fun at sports bars…
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
Yes. This. I second this.
The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’d buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.
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’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 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.
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.
Having to use something like Windows IME on a phone for Japanese is nightmare fuel
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.
