Is the reason nostalgia? Frustration with the iPhone's worsening software keyboard? Boredom?

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.

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      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.