QWERTY Telephones Are Actually Attempting to Make a Comeback This 12 months

After dying a painful loss of life on the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this 12 months.

No, BlackBerry isn’t returning regardless of enthusiast efforts to retrofit old BlackBerry Classics with modern-day parts like a quicker CPU, extra RAM and storage, a much bigger battery, and a USB-C port. Whether or not it’s nostalgia for a bodily keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or simply plain boredom with glass slabs, corporations are rebooting QWERTY telephones this 12 months for some purpose.

At CES 2026, Clicks, the corporate behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, introduced plans to promote the Communicator, a “second telephone” with a QWERTY keypad. Clicks pitches the $500 telephone, launching later this 12 months, as a tool primarily supposed for messaging—sending texts, DMs, Slack messages, no matter. The corporate didn’t have a practical unit—solely a mockup dummy to fondle on the present—but it surely regarded cool sufficient, even when it’ll be a really area of interest product. It’s a cool concept, however how many individuals will carry a companion telephone to their major telephone simply to shoot off just a few DMs? $500 is so much to ask for that satisfaction.

However Clicks isn’t the one one making an attempt to convey again QWERTY telephones. Unihertz, makers of the actually tiny Jelly Android telephones and likewise Tank phones with massive battery capacities, additionally teased a brand new telephone with a bodily keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite appears to be a much less gimmicky model of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff however with a weird sq. display screen on the bottom.

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— Unihertz (@Unihertz) January 12, 2026

Look intently, and there are some bizarre similarities between the Clicks Communicator and the Titan 2 Elite. We don’t have dimension specs but, however the screens appear to have the identical rounded corners, and even the hole-punch digital camera is in the identical upper-left nook. The one distinction appears to be the keyboards; the Communicator makes use of particular person keys, whereas the Titan 2 Elite’s keyboard is extra BlackBerry-esque.

Both approach, two QWERTY telephone bulletins on this nonetheless very new 12 months counsel there could also be some sort of pattern. Possibly after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the cell expertise, it’s time to return to the bodily keyboard and its extra tactile typing. Or possibly there’s only a keyboard provider on the market firing up its factories and making an attempt to pump out barely totally different—however largely similar—telephones to anyone prepared to pay them. I suppose we nonetheless have 352 days left to search out out if extra telephone makers have the center to revive the spirit of the BlackBerry.