This barebones smartphone is a modern take on the classic BlackBerry

When the iPhone launched in 2007, other tech companies laughed in disbelief. Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that the lack of a physical keyboard on Apple’s latest gadget would make it difficult to sell to business customers. Almost two decades later, the iPhone remains undefeated. It sparked a cultural revolution in personal computing, rendering every keyboard-carrying competitor irrelevant in the process.

But one company is now asking, what if Ballmer had a point? As we ditch our full-sized BlackBerry and Palm keyboards for touchscreen typing, have we accepted a downgraded typing experience in the name of progress and larger screens? That’s where Clicks, the company best known for making iPhone and Android cases with full-sized, physical keyboards built inside them, comes into the picture. Click cases make modern smartphones look comically long, but for a certain type of customer—those of us old enough to remember drooling over the latest RIM handsets—adding real buttons is worth the cumbersome cost.

With BlackBerry’s revival nowhere in sight, however, Clix has taken the next step and revealed its own smartphone in early 2026. The Click Communicator, as it’s called, aims to reproduce the best aspects of BlackBerry with some modern ideas thrown into the mix. This could be the perfect phone for anyone who wants to kick their doomscrolling habit and turn their smartphone into a productivity hub. Or, it could be a passing curiosity that ends up in a desk drawer. Either way, it’s one of the most unique Android phones we’ve seen in a while.

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The Click Communicator we’ve never had is a BlackBerry

As its name suggests, Click Communicator is a pocketable Android device built around messaging and email. With a squared-off, 4.03-inch AMOLED display taking up the top half of the palm-sized handset and a full QWERTY keyboard at the bottom, the device is ill-suited to scrolling through TikTok or Instagram – and that’s about it. Clicks partnered with Niagara Launcher, a popular third-party home screen replacement app for Android, to create Communicator’s interface. Instead of a row of pinned apps, its home screen is a list of messages from Google Messages, WhatsApp, Slack, email clients, and so on.

Although it can be used as a standalone device, Clicks is positioning the Communicator as a secondary device for use with a typical smartphone. Still, those who push against social media — or prefer smaller phones — may find Communicator tempting as a primary tool.

Running Android 16 out of the box, the Communicator will support all the same apps as a Samsung or Google phone. However, Clicks neglected to mention which processor will power the device, only revealing that it will be a modern, 4nm SOC from MediaTek. That term indicates a mid-range chip, which accounts for the Communicator’s $500 launch price (though early reservers will pay $399 instead).

New ideas in an old form factor

While we don’t know how well the Click Communicator will feel to use without hands-on testing, it at least enters the market with some new ideas packed into a form factor reminiscent of some of the most iconic BlackBerry phones of all time. What isn’t new, however, is the 3.5mm headphone jack or expandable microSD storage. Nor is it a new idea to make the entire keyboard a touch-sensitive, swipeable trackpad with a fingerprint reader in the spacebar.

RIM killed off older clicks of those features with the BlackBerry Passport in 2014, and the latter was first found on the BlackBerry KeyOne in 2017. Still, physical mobile keyboard enthusiasts will be happy to see those features make their way into the Communicator. Similarly, the “kill switch” that silences the phone is exemplified in smartphones from OnePlus and Apple.

Unique to the communicator is what is called a click signal LED. On the side of the phone is the main button with a bright RGB LED. This LED, reminiscent of the LED notification lights present on Android devices in the 2010s, can be customized to show different colors based on alerts from specific messaging platforms or contacts — you can use green for WhatsApp or blue for Slack, but also pink for your significant other or red for your boss. These message-focused actions are emblematic of the communicator’s purpose-built design. Like custom Android skins, they’re a deliberate choice to make messaging better, even if they make the phone less suitable for other purposes.

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Read the original article on SlashGear.