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.
I had a Nexus that I got as a hand me down. It had a ball with customizable colors
The next one I had after that had an led you could customize for different types of notifications
Yeah the LEDs were always handy to have, and the coloured notifications on the trackball (nexus 1) with a third party app was super cool at the time. My trackball after a few years got pretty dirty and didn’t want to clean with chemicals in fear of damaging it.
Currently using a Nothing (3) which is somewhat similar with the small led display on the back.
I still have it around somewhere in hopes I can fix it
When I got it, my family said it didn’t work, it had some weird error. I charged it and turned it on so they were like “sure you can have it”
It was my first smartphone,. actually, and I used it for quite a while until it died again. I don’t remember the error, but it was basically bricked and I couldn’t factory reset it via the phone menu. I had a very young child and trying to figure out the android sdk for a computer to fiddle that out was too taxing for me
I really liked that phone for sure. I’m sure it’s a lot of nostalgia, but I miss the older simpler phones. Much easier to handle, too.
I’ve currently just been using every couple generations of the Xa model. This one’s a pixel 7a, last was a 4a which the child has now. It’s got severe battery life issues after that update recently but I haven’t looked into it too hard. Been wanting to look for some alternatives and I’m leaning towards something unconventional, at least by today’s standards. I checked out that phone and it really looks good, both aesthetically and specs wise