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.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
436 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
78705 readers
3862 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I miss my Blackberry Pearl...
I fear that that design of phone layout/UI will never make a comeback.
The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside
The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2
They just had to announce it after I ordered the one with all the "bizarre" gimmicks.
These small keyboars are very bad and just really horrible when using. At least in my experience.
Yeah, small devices are always going to be awkward to type on.
I assume every single one is a low quality cash grab
Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.
Oooooh
Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!
Droid CEO here.
No.
God i hope so
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.
Algorithmic flattening in action.
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?
I just want Starks phone in the first Iron Man movie (I don't think it was ever a real product) but as a modern smart phone.
One thing has become abundantly clear: You, me, and so many others in the comments here need to be in charge of phone design and not whoever's been doing it for the last 10 years.
Hey, finally some things that aren't exactly the same as everything else.
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.
That looks really interesting. I’d like to know if the boot loader is locked.
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... :(
Oh, I also ordered one in December, waiting for arrival still. Glad you liked it, it gives me hopes. Are you finding it's squareness to be an issue?
They said 8GB in one of their CES interviews.
I loved my Passport but the Titan 2 just looked frumpy in a way that the Passport didn't. It's not looks that keeps me from buying it though; it's the complete lack of security updates which would prevent me from using it for work. Unihertz has promised better support starting with Titan 2. If that turns out to be true, then the upcoming Titan Elite will be an attractive competitor to the Clicks Communicator, which has promised 5 years of security updates.
Needs Signal as well as LoRa /mesh
I’d be all over it then.
Except I find MrMobile weird.
It's just an Android phone, so yeah, it'll have Signal.
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Gizmodo didn't always look like the penny arcade website, did they?
Great now I can't unsee it.
Yeah this is something I need since my fingers don’t always register on touch screens.
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.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I actually have a usecase for virtual keyboards - being able to easily change the layout on-the-fly (which is obviously impossible with a physical one)
You can change remapping, and it's basically next best thing
What do you mean by "changing the layout", going from QWERTY to Dvorak, or something like switching between English and Chinese glyphs? Both are possible at least in software. Technically you can move around/replace keycaps to match your layout too, but obviously that would be super inconvenient to do regularly
load more comments
(1 replies)
Im personally typing this from my clicks for pixel :3
clicks for pixel
If it wasn't $139 I'd consider it. Ngl, even $39 seems excessively expensive...
To be fair that's literally all qwerty keyboard phones, the only difference is my expensive keyboard is attached to a proper phone with decent software support (also yeah its expensive but compared to what, nobody else sells anything similar).
Honestly, I just want something actually functional that's not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›