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. No, BlackBerry isn’t returning despite enthusiast efforts to retrofit old BlackBerry Classics with modern-day components like a faster CPU, more RAM and storage, a bigger battery, and a USB-C port. 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. Clicks pitches the $500 phone, launching later this year, as a device primarily intended for messaging—sending texts, DMs, Slack messages, whatever. The company didn’t have a functional unit—only a mockup dummy to fondle at the show—but it looked cool enough, even if it’ll be a very niche product. It’s a cool idea, but how many people will carry a companion phone to their main phone just to shoot off a few DMs? $500 is a lot to ask for that satisfaction. © Clicks But Clicks isn’t the only one trying to bring back QWERTY phones. Unihertz, makers of the really tiny Jelly Android phones and also Tank phones with massive battery capacities, 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. > New 𝗤𝗪𝗘𝗥𝗧𝗬 is coming…Stay tuned 🔥✨ Sign up here > https://t.co/Lh1W8f7zcW pic.twitter.com/NDk42TeZ6J > > — Unihertz (@Unihertz) January 12, 2026 Look closely, and there are some weird similarities between the Clicks Communicator and the Titan 2 Elite. We don’t have dimension specs yet, but the screens seem to have the same rounded corners, and even the hole-punch camera is in the same upper-left corner. The only difference seems to be the keyboards; the Communicator uses individual keys, whereas the Titan 2 Elite’s keyboard is more BlackBerry-esque. Either way, two 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. Or maybe there’s just a keyboard supplier out there firing up its factories and trying to pump out slightly different—but mostly identical—phones to anybody willing to pay them. I guess we still have 352 days left to find out if more phone makers have the guts to revive the spirit of the BlackBerry.

Star Trek LCARS Style Android Smart Home Control Dashboard.: Welcome dear reader. I have had custom launchers on my phones for a few years now which you can find out more about in my Custom Android Launcher UI Instructable. So I waned to take the opportunity to share how I designed and implemented my setup to…

Public Domain Day 2026 (web.law.duke.edu) 12-28  ↑ 100 HN Points

Meraki API interface. Contribute to luigirosa/meraki development by creating an account on GitHub.