The QWERTY smartphone refuses to stay buried and appears to be defying the ghost of Steve Jobs and emerging from its grave.
After the Fruity Cargo Cult, Apple’s iPhone and its capacitive touchscreen helped shove physical keyboards into the ground, forcing users to spend their lives stabbing ineffectively at touchscreens. Suddenly, there is a move to bring back QWERTY smartphones.
Enthusiasts have been trying to rework old BlackBerry Classics with faster guts, more memory, bigger batteries and USB-C. Some of it looks like nostalgia, some of it looks like irritation with iOS’s increasingly ropey software keyboard.
At CES 2026, Clicks, the firm behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, said it plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad. Clicks is punting it as a messaging machine for texts, DMs, Slack and whatever else your boss insists is not email.
The $500 handset is meant to land later this year, but the company did not have a working unit on the show floor, just a dummy to paw at. It looked slick enough, even if the whole “second phone” pitch screams niche, especially at that price.
Clicks is not alone in resurrecting the thumbboard. Unihertz, which makes the tiny Jelly Android phones and the Tank models with daftly huge batteries, has teased a new phone with a physical keyboard too.
The Titan 2 Elite looks like a less daft take on the Titan 2, a BlackBerry Passport-inspired slab that had a strange square screen on the back. Unihertz is sticking with a BlackBerry-style keyboard look, while the Communicator goes for individual keys.
Peek a bit closer, and the two devices look suspiciously related. The screens appear to share the same rounded corners, and even the hole-punch camera sits in the same upper-left corner.
Two QWERTY announcements this early in the year hint at a mini-trend, or at least a supplier somewhere dusting off a catalogue and flogging near-identical designs to whoever turns up with a chequebook. After 19 years of touchscreen dominance, the return of clacky buttons might be a proper revival, or just another round of gadget cosplay that fades once the novelty wears off.
