The leadership behind this project is f(x)tec. While they're not outright scammers they have a TERRIBLE track record in delivering products like this. Just look up the old fxtec community forums or the indiegogo pages for the pro1 / pro1x.
It's just data points but so far the modus operandi was to take pre-order money and then take years to deliver a bad product with no aftermarket support. There were always new excuses about what happened (shipping company stole our stuff! chip reseller scammed us! etc) but no transparency. The reality seems to be they ran out of money and instead of being upfront about it kept making up new stories why nothing was happening. The few devices they have shipped are basically unusable unless you're going to mod the hard- and software yourself (no security updates, issues in antenna design, outdated hardware by the time it ships, keyboard quality issues, you name it).
If you're interested in the device I implore you to wait until you can buy it upfront (ideally in a physical store) and return it at your convenience.
I thought I needed a keyboard too, but when everything is designed for a slab screen and your "productivity" phone randomly shuts down or has no reception in a major area, you gotta think about what productivity really means.
This thing will run android on a mediatek chip, it's not a purchase once and done type thing like the keyboard attachment.
The Fxtec Pro 1 tried to implement a sliding keyboard mechanism, which is mechanically complicated: the Palm Pre ran into problems with that design and the Blackberry Priv in 2015 discontinued that design after only one generation, switching back to integrated PKBs for the KeyOne and Key2.
Enough for me to avoid them as they seem to have spent some effort hiding that association.
Not finding that is enough to avoid.
(not affiliated but feels a bit rough as a critique for a companty that has shipped keyboards for a while)
either way it is a physical address, I was just responding to the invalid claim above
First, typing was actually slower and more error prone. Even nearly a year into owning it, I was constantly misclicking and spending loads of time correcting myself.
Second, you loose a ton of navigate functionality with the hardware keyboards. Holding space to navigate between characters is gone. Emojis are gone. GIF keyboards are gone.
Third, none of the apps are built for this aspect ratio or screen size. Often this is just an annoyance - but there are times this became an actual, legitimate blocker. Items would be laid out off screen in a way that you couldn’t access them. The solution: a scaled view where everything was ridiculously tiny.
Three B: too many situations where the virtual keyboard would come up and you’d literally have the entire screen covered.
I didn’t realize how much value I lose with these issues until I experienced them. Every thing you’ve relied on essentially become unreliable because you might not be able to use certain functionality.
The aspect ratio/screen size issue is annoying, but I find that a combination of the screen lock setting (for annoying apps that rotate the screen when they go "full screen") combined with scrolling using the capacitive keyboard works just fine without blocking the entire screen.
The one problem I have with the phone, and the reason I'm not dailying it, is that Unihertz is notoriously bad at providing software updates. I'm not too impressed with the Clicks phone either on that front, though at least they're beating Unihertz:
> Communicator will run Android 16. We’re comfortable committing to 2 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.
The clicks launcher looks pretty slick, though. I'll definitely try to run that on my Titan 2 when the APK eventually gets dumped.
As to the rest - I owned one of every model of BlackBerry's Android PKB phones and none of this was an issue, so I'd say a lot of it may be Unihertz's execution. Losing navigation functionality with a PKB? That's shocking, you should have _gained_ advantage rather than lost anything.
Makes me almost happy I haven't gone for a Unihertz when my last Key2 croaked.
What I realized is modern soft-keyboards are actually exceptionally good handling slight miss-clicks. I stopped worrying about hitting the key exactly and just punched it close enough. Auto-correct seems able to figure out that 5% off of a key should be weighed as that key being hit and gets the word right.
With a hard keyboard, I'd just end up with total garbage sometimes.
What I discovered was that the best BB keyboards for error-free typing were the curved 4-row keyboards on the Bold 9000, 9700 and 9900. The Passport kb was flat, rectangular and only had 3 rows over a very wide layout and placed at the very bottom of the phone, making it cramped to type on. I love the idea of keyboard phones but only BB of yore did it right.
One notable app that also failed this way was, the irony, the Work suite, soon owned by... BlackBerry. My dear employer dropped BES support and moved to Work, which didn't work on BBs after some time, and that was the end of it (BBOS) for me.
Only BB did it right, but - and I don't know to what extent - it still sits on some amount of IP/patents that cover the doing it right.
it sounds like there is a slow and steady open source community around either replacement q20 keyboards, or a reverse-engineered one? https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/the-blackberry-keyboard-how-...
and the beepy, which runs linux and for some reason has the keyboard blurred out on its homepage https://beepy.sqfmi.com/
Trademark stuff, as far as I remember.
> For instance, the Beepberry project became Beepy – because of Blackberry, legally speaking, raising an eyebrow at the naming decision; it’s the kind of legal situation we’ve seen happen with projects like Notkia. If you ever get such a letter, please don’t hold any hard feelings towards the company – after all, trademarks can legally be lost if the company doesn’t take action to defend them. From what I gather, BlackBerry’s demands were low, as it goes with such claims – the project was renamed to Beepy going forward, and that’s about it.
I think to poke fun at it, they blur out the keeb haha
If you press and hold the emoji button in the lower left, you can pick to have the keyboard shift to the left or right, for easier one handed typing. On the iPad I think you can pull the keyboard apart so you can use one thumb on each side of the screen while holding it (last I used it, you could do this with a gesture of putting your two thumbs in the center of the keyboard and pulling them apart toward the sides).
Press and hold on letters or symbols for accidents or more related symbols. I don’t think this one is that big of a secret, but it’s worth going through all the symbols to see everything that’s available.
I don’t have an iPad currently, but I think it has the numbers on the top row of letters, and you can swipe up (or down, I don’t remember) on the key for quick entry of some numbers without changing to the symbol keyboard.
Double tap the shift key for CAPS LOCK.
In the Settings, there is built in text expansion support (Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement). Adding curse words in here was a way to get around the “ducking” auto-correct in the past, with the typed word and the replacement being set to the same word. If want a way to type more obscure symbols, this is a way to set that up as well, I can type , for example.
They upgraded the speech to text a few years ago. If you got in the habit of not bothering, because you had to be perfect in one take, it’s better now. You can speak, take breaks, and manually correct and add things with your keyboard in the middle of dictation.
That’s all that comes to mind for now.
Source: an iPhone 6s in the family that was a joy for all the right reasons. My current SE 2020 is good, but the lack of force touch really sucks tbh. Do you know, for eg, you could open multitasking with force touch instead of the home button?
Press and hold works for some stuff, but it’s slower. The press and hold to get to the lock screen switcher feels very slow, and inconsistently slow on top of that. Some days it seems to work, while others it seems to take forever.
Phones with hardware keyboard like this requires a good keyboard companion app, which Unihertz doesn't have.
The Passport was pretty much perfect, and I've not loved a phone as much before or since.
ISTR Unihertz had to make some significant UX tradeoffs to avoid a Blackberry patent infringement (how else do you explain that shift key). I also found it tiresome to use.
And the screen was square, which many websites didn't like. And high resolution and small, which made it fiddly to use.
I don't know if I'll get the Clicks Communicator. Mostly because looking at the above list, I'd have to admit that I have a phone problem...
(I also have another phone problem, which is that I can't seem to type anything accurately on my iPhone keyboard. Solidarity with hardware-keyboard-users.)
Android 16 forces developers to use a dynamic screen size, you can't force your app to be landscape only anymore. So maybe this aspect will be less of a problem in the future.
I need this desperately when the Claude app gets in a psuedo error state.
I was insanely disappointed when Apple took away the pressure sensitive functionality almost solely because I routinely used it for this purpose, and it never occurred to me that they moved it.
I really do hope they succeed, and will definitely buy one if it turns out to be a viable product, but not before that.
The Clicks Keyboard for iPhone (14) was a great concept, and pretty well executed for a V1 - I haven’t tried their follow-up devices.
But assuming it’s the same team, there’s a history of shipping devices behind them.
(That isn’t to encourage you to pre-order! Just to perhaps contribute some more optimism to your hope that they succeed)
The only annoyance is rememberimg to hold the magic key combo before plugging it in for car play. Regardless, this is a real company that delivers real products of solid quality.
Being LineageOS capable is a strong selling point (for the Pro 1x), so if that's on the table with this new phone then I would consider reserving one. But I wouldn't hold my breath that it will ship in 2026.
Electronics are the exact opposite. Coming up with an idea and getting some renders done is at least 1,000x easier than the remaining work from idea to shipping 10,000 units, therefore it's reasonable to expect that at least 90% of kickstarters for such products will fail to deliver, leaving backers holding the bag, since all our money has been spent already on the failed attempts.
Furthermore, I tend to think that if, due to some combination of their existing reputation + the amount of the work they've already completely finished, the project were a safe bet, then they'd be able to get investors to front them any further needed startup funds the normal way.
At some point, Kickstarter (et al) campaigns switch from high-risk speculative products to marketing pitches (get in early!). I think this is one of the later. You're right that they could probably have (or have already) funded the product development themselves. I think this pitch is trying to build a market early in the year before potential competitor products are announced.
The alternative I went with, and which I recommend, is getting both a smartphone and a nokia shitphone (no internet). Then ask the carrier for a sim duplicate. These exist, and are in fact a new number that redirects to your number. Use and carry whichever you want, knowing that calls will all go to both phones.
I tend to delete apps from my phone if I find myself spending too much time on them. My “social” folder in the app drawer contains Phone, FaceTime, and Messages. Just the built-in stuff. It also helps to have a healthy level of distrust of these companies, so you don’t want to use their services in the first place.
This doesn’t make the phone “dumb”, but it does make it more of a utility device. I go through my apps pretty regularly looking for stuff to delete. I still have more apps than I’d like, but they are mostly boring (banking, healthcare, etc).
The only big issue that remains is the browser. I can’t get rid of it, but it is still a portal to YouTube, HN, and other such things. This has its pros and cons.
> Can Communicator be used as my primary phone?
Without them making a statement of how long they will provide security updates for, this could easily go like past phones of mine.
My work tightens their mobile security policy, and the device can no longer meet it. This is for both Android version and security updates. Happened to me a few times where I had to stop using a perfectly good phone which wasn't that old.
(Now I bought a Pixel I only use on wifi - 7 years of updates, and actually better for my WLB, since I leave work at home by default, or stuff a second phone in my pocket if I want to take it with)
They said this:
What version of Android will be supported?
Communicator will run Android 16. We’re comfortable committing to 2 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.I'd stop buying them but everything else is bad in some other way. It is hilarious that the official Google phones have the fewest ads and forced app installs.
If it's super important, my regular cell gets called. My regular phone has 0 work stuff on it. My employer couldn't access personal stuff on it if they wanted to.
It's true that having two devices might seem complicated, but this is the only setup that ended working out for me: when I know I won't need any smart features on my life, I am happy to go out with my dumphone without worrying about missing urgent calls.
You can go to Screen Time and disable Safari and App Store.
You can protect it with a passcode, which is what I did.
After a few weeks I just got used to my phone being dumb.
Now these apps are unlocked, but the habit is there, and I use it for utility only.
It's running regular Android with a custom version of Niagara launcher (which it seems I need to try), and seems like it's a product built by people who want to use it. Which makes me hopeful that a lot of care was put into designing it. It seems like they're aiming it towards people that want a second device for work, which -in my mind- means there might be some compromises, so I'll be waiting for reviews to decide if it can hold up as a daily driver or not.
It should be noted, they claim that the keyboard is touch sensitive and can be used for scrolling, so it might actually solve some of the usability issues that immediately come to mind.
TBH, I'm a little surprised by all the hate. This might not be a product for you, or it might not speak to you for other reasons. The fact is that this company has seen success with their phone cases (I don't get it either), and has now announced two new products that should reach more of the market (the other is a magsafe slide out keyboard, it's very cool). If you don't like it, fair enough, but that doesn't mean it's a bad product.
Also, who cares if it's beautiful.
People who will carry the device with them every day care if it is beautiful.
I know Hackers only care about size of RAM, no matter what kind of device and what kind of usage.
The Razr 2024/25 + the clicks keyboard is probably the "best" so far. Although I just got a Zinwa Q25. Amazing how good that formfactor feels after having candy bars this long.
> Cameras
> Rear: 50MP OIS
> Front: 24MP
Honestly, this sounds like a great deal
It does seem like a great deal either way though!
It does not merely feel that way; it often is. That is because megapixels measure the dimensions of the files the camera generates (this is not the same as resolution) and as such are almost the worst measure of camera quality.
Boring tech websites like comparing megapixels, because that is a number, and that allows people who do not know how cameras work to review products and have opinions without actually using them. Truth is that pixels, a measure of resolution, have been irrelevant for years when one is not printing them huge or looking at them full-size on gigantic computer monitors. More or less nobody is doing that these days; they're looking at them a few inches wide on their phones or tablets, usually via [insert social app] that downsizes and compresses the shit out of them to save on bandwidth & storage.
Things like
* colour rendition * contrast rendition * low-light ability * speed of operation (allows you to get a photo in the first place) * and more things I could name
...are all far more important to what makes a good camera on a phone. If more people were like you and actually LOOKED AT THE PHOTOS we might have ended up with much better cameras than we have now.
They should focus on the largest potential market: parents who buy a phone like this to text with their kids without allowing them to have a completely internet connected phone.
Hope that simple idea for the colored button based on what your notification is will catch on, thats pretty neat design.
The fact of the matter is that the smartphone market could not support more than a few players. Blackberry was just one of several vendors without vertically integrated supply chains that disappeared: HTC, Nokia, LG and Sony all abandoned the market as well.
But... Two phones?
Everyone I've ever known with two phones has been embarassed to have to have the second one.
It's DOA.
I second/third/forth all the other comments on this already, it would be better if I didn't have to buy into the google android system; seems like google has lost most of the trust with most people.
If you don't mind me asking on here, what materials will the frame be made out of? Asking because I used my 15 Pro Max Clicks somewhat intensely and managed to dig through the rubber on the bottom right and bottom left edge with the friction from typing alone. Keyboard still works flawlessly, but the case looks like it's seen an apocalypse...
Also would love to see a video showcase of the touch functionality on the keyboard, I can already imagine a few ways that'll be useful.
Am personally waiting for the next Razr before deciding whether I'll replace my iPhone with a Communicator or the next Clicks for Razr (hoping that there will be one). Then again, Motorola has hinted at a book style foldable for CES so if that is interesting, might go for the PowerKeys instead. Or might there be something for larger phones, perhaps inspired by an old Samsung phone, dare we dream? That'd "zeal" my purchase for sure...
The keyboard is a really good lock in mind you, once I got the hang of it I really detested (a very strong word, but it is true) any time I had to use a smartphone without one, even if only briefly.