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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
Phones with hardware keyboard like this requires a good keyboard companion app, which Unihertz doesn't have.
I need this desperately when the Claude app gets in a psuedo error state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.