Technology

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.

I played with the Chinese Zinwa Q25 last year and it sooo felt like a Blackberry. Too bad the Q25 is plagued with issues or I would have bought one.

Almost two decades later and I still miss my Blackberry keyboard.

The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.

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.

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

Blackberry please come back.

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 trying to get my hands on one. There's a few apps that I still want a smart phone for like email, navigation, Garmin Connect. This would be awesome.

But mark my words, the Clicks Communicator will be a piece of shit.

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.

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.

There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it's a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry's dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I've always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

There's something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it's that they're happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.

I miss my old Motorola Droid 2. I don't need a thinner phone, give me that slider form factor.

I'll care when they're Dvorak phones /s

Yes, please!

The Titan 2 Elite looks awesome though it appears to be just a render right now. I was looking at the original Titan a while back but it was pretty dated even then. Gonna keep an eye out for the Elite.

The phone will come powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor, have 12GB of RAM, and 512GB of internal storage. There is no word on the display or the battery, but going by the previous release, it should be an AMOLED screen, and the battery should be 5,000mAh. Neither is there any word about the release timeline, pricing, or other features of the device right now. The sole official render of the phone suggests a sleeker-looking body, erringly similar to the Clicks Communicator.

Hell yes - as long as it still fits in my pocket. That was a prolem with some of the later Blackberry models.

I was a huge 'tactical keyboard on phone' kinda guy. Then I got acclimated to Swype. I don't think I could ever go back but think choice is good.

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!

the Voyager and enV style phones with the touchscreen in front and flip to open to qwerty keyboard really gave the best of the worlds