It's amazing how homogenized phones became: Apple or Google flavoured slabs with a 6" or 6.5" display. That's starting to change with foldable displays and it looks like 2026 might be a comeback year for hardware keyboards, so I'm optimistic about mobile devices being more than just social media consumption machines.

Fifteen years ago you could get portrait sliders and landscape sliders and flip phones and BlackBerry style phones and phones that had game controls, and 4" slabs and 6" slabs (called "phablets" back then). There was so much more choice and it was so much more fun. Five years ago you couldn't even get a modern phone that's less than 6" so it fits easily in your pocket.

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

Honestly, I just want something actually functional that's not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.

Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!

The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.

Instead of ever-bigger screens thanks to flip open folding displays, how about the same size phone that flips open to an easily usable qwerty board?

God i hope so

While we're at it, can I have back the mini trrackball with integrated notification LED from my HTC Hero?

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.

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 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.

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 used to pine for this. I loved my physical keyboard on the Treo and Palm Pre. I didn't keep it long, but I even rocked a Moto Photon Q for a bit.

Then I found swipe typing and will never go back. It is SO much faster

Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.

I'd buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.

I got the Unihertz Titan 2 in December and I absolutely love it. 12GB of RAM are amazing. The camera isn't good, I hope they'll improve that with the next model.

Clicks is very quiet about the amount of RAM in their device, it seems like they haven't finalized that yet. Given current RAM pricing, I fear a 6GB model coming... :(

Hey, finally some things that aren't exactly the same as everything else.

Fuck do I miss my first gen Droid. A physical slide out keyboard that was also a switch between portrait and landscape view. I hate auto gyro rotation with a passion.

I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn't have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don't think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM's servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you'd made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I'd like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

Y’all are allowed to hot glue a Bluetooth keyboard to the back of your phone you know.

Jokes aside, I wonder why there aren’t more protective cases with a built in sliding keyboard for phones. Would be cool.

The minimal phone looks like a brick and I understand why the e-ink is a choice that forces you to not use your phone as much but I’m not ready.

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.

People should look into the ikko mind one too. Its shit that they have so much emphasis on their "AI OS" which is just an integrated app (which can be requested to be removed before delivery or removed via adb). But the hardware looks solid.

Its a square screen phone that you can get a keyboard case for that includes a hifi dac. Its camera is a big sony sensor that can flip over to the front so they didn't need to split the camera money between two or more sensors.