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.
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