Clicks Communicator is phone purpose-built for taking action and communicating in a noisy world with deeper context, versatile input and greater control in a compact design.
Communicator will support 5G, 4GLTE, 3G/2G global bands and be sold unlocked. 5G NR: n41, n77, n78, n1, n2, n3, n5, n7, n8, n12, n13, n14, n20, n25, n26, n28, n38, n40, n41, n48, n66, n71, n77, n785G NR (4×4 MIMO): n1, n2, n3, n7, n25, n38, n40, n41, n48, n66, n77, n78LTE (4G):FDD: B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B7, B8, B12, B13, B14, B17, B18, B19, B20, B25, B26, B28, B66, B71TDD: B34, B38, B39, B40, B41, B42, B483G / 2G:WCDMA: B1, B2, B4, B5, B6, B8, B9, B19
GSM: B2, B3, B5, B8
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By darthbanane 2026-01-0310:075 reply I would recommend not touching pre-orders with a 10-foot pole.
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unusable unless you're going to mod the hard- and software yourself (no security updates, issues in antenna design, outdated hardware by the time it ships, keyboard quality issues, you name it).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.
I have a founders edition Clicks keyboard for the iPhone 15 Pro. Its really a fantastic piece of hardware; worked great since I got it, idk, maybe 14 months ago. Obviously this is a full device and much more complicated, but I wouldn't personally have any qualms taking a risk on it given that their track record for the other clicks devices is pretty solid IME.
By darthbanane 2026-01-0318:28 Your keyboard doesn't connect to the internet or run an OS. These are very different requirements to have for a company you purchase from IMO.
This thing will run android on a mediatek chip, it's not a purchase once and done type thing like the keyboard attachment.
By rchaud 2026-01-0315:00 I had forgotten about FXTec. I think Clicks could be different though. For one thing they have already shipped keyboard accessories for the iPhone and the Moto Razr. The core technology is there. Additionally, a small company like Unihertz has shipped several variants of PKB phones reliably over the last few years.
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.
By fooker 2026-01-0319:26 Huh interesting, didn't realize this was effectively a rebranding of fxtec.
Enough for me to avoid them as they seem to have spent some effort hiding that association.
By burnte 2026-01-0320:53 I bought the first gen on preorder, literally returned it the day after I got it. They were cheap feeling, super lightweight and chincy, cheap and hard to press buttons, weird keyboard layout, and the whole thing was too top heavy to use.
I tried to find a contacts page, with physical address and phone #.
Not finding that is enough to avoid.
https://www.clicks.tech/pages/about-clicks ?
(not affiliated but feels a bit rough as a critique for a companty that has shipped keyboards for a while)
By darthbanane 2026-01-0319:001 reply The physical address is just a coworking space according to streetview. It's the same address as fxtec: https://www.fxtec.com/
where do you see it is a coworking space? looks to me like a normal office building
either way it is a physical address, I was just responding to the invalid claim above
By darthbanane 2026-01-0319:45 It was meant as an addendum. I might have confused it with the chancery house on the other side of the road, streetview footage shows construction signs for a coworking space so I assumed it would be that. The actual address seems to be from a law firm, not sure how good of a sign that is. It's not unusual for UK companies to use their solicitor's address
where do you see that link here: https://www.clicksphone.com
By atorodius 2026-01-049:02 "visit our main site" -> about in the footer
By b3nji 2026-01-0417:58
By SkyPuncher 2026-01-0218:3110 reply I had the Unihertz Titan for a while . It was a fun experiment, but I ultimately found it too annoying for continued daily use
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.
I have the Titan 2 and I find that with the right software, these problems aren't as bad in the new release. The typing itself is a personal preference, of course; the keyboard needs to happen to be the right size for your hands or you're going to have a bad time. For navigating between characters, there's an excellent open source keyboard (https://github.com/palsoftware/pastiera) that provides a lot of features normally present in a soft keyboard that Unihertz didn't include in their keyboard. I switch between that and Swiftkey, though Swiftkey likes to open a full soft keyboard interface for no reason no matter how many ways I try to disable it.
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.
By xethos 2026-01-038:15 The launcher is Niagara launcher, it's available today, and it's one of the recommended ones for the Q25 because it supports keyboard shortcuts from the homescreen natively. I'd imagine your Titan 2 would behave similarly :)
By backscratches 2026-01-0220:16 This one says the keyboard is touch sensitive, like the old android blackberries, so you can still do some swipe gestures
As for the typing itself, just curious, were you a Blackberry user in the past? I was for 15+ years, but I've never used a Unihertz. But my typing experience was always running circles around every poor soul with a touch keyboard.
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.
By SkyPuncher 2026-01-0222:33 Yes, I was. I had a physical-keyboard phone for as long as I reasonably could.
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.
Not the person you're replying to, but I was a big BB user in the 2000s and had the Blackberry Passport briefly in 2015 to test its Android app compatibility (it was pretty damn compatible!).
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.
By wowczarek 2026-01-031:42 Completely agree on the curved keyboards. BB Classic was the last proper one and I loved it. Android app compatibility was spot on as well, where it failed, not to RIM's fault, was that you had to hack around google play services, and as a result, apps that did "device security checks", like banking apps, failed.
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.
By awinter-py 2026-01-0223:172 reply miss the bold 9000 so much
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/
By girvo 2026-01-031:50 > and for some reason
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
By xethos 2026-01-038:19 A Q20 project has actually launched. The Zinwa Q25 uses the Q20 hardware with a new mainboard and battery. I have one, this comment was written with one, and I can say for damn sure: They're real, and they're fantastic.
By lanyard-textile 2026-01-0221:203 reply Holding the spacebar down... I never knew about this... are there any other Apple keyboard secrets?
By al_borland 2026-01-0314:37 The Apple keyboard added swipe support a couple years ago, use your finger to make a single swipe across all the letters in the word you want to type. Like SwiftKey.
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.
While holding it down, tap with another finger to start selecting text instead of just moving the cursor around.
By al_borland 2026-01-0314:141 reply I’m trying this, but it feels pretty buggy. I don’t feel like I have much control.
Not your fault. In the past it used force touch which allowed you to trigger it from anywhere on the keyboard (instead of the spacebar only). This made it far more powerful/flexible. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, removed it.
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?
By al_borland 2026-01-0315:00 I miss Force Touch as well. I think they rebranded it to 3D Touch, to avoid the jokes.
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.
By PlunderBunny 2026-01-0323:54 In a text field that accepts a URL, press and hold the full-stop to show a list of common domains, plus the local country domain and the local variant for .com
By hasperdi 2026-01-0219:46 I have the Titan slim, and my experience is similar to what you described. I think most of the bad experience is caused by Unihertz half competent implementation.
Phones with hardware keyboard like this requires a good keyboard companion app, which Unihertz doesn't have.
By savolai 2026-01-0220:26 It’s funny we have gone full circle. I still miss the nokias and bbs for being able to just write without typoing all the time and without the cognitivr load thay comes wiyh foxinh typos ally yeh time. Authentic samplr.
By afandian 2026-01-0220:46 I had a Motorola Dext, HTC Desire Z, Blackberry Passport, Blackberry KeyOne, and Titan Pocket. And Gemini PDA.
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.)
By reddalo 2026-01-0317:52 > none of the apps are built for this aspect ratio or screen size
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.
Holy shit I just learned about using space to navigate between characters. That's amazing, thanks.
If you tap and hold a second thumb after you’ve tapped and held to bring up the moveable cursor, it switches to a selection range.
By SkyPuncher 2026-01-031:54 Well.....I'll be damned.
I need this desperately when the Claude app gets in a psuedo error state.
By cocomutator 2026-01-0221:15 My life just changed forever too...
By obvi8 2026-01-034:21 I had no idea holding the spacebar moved between characters now. Your comment fixed a years long gripe for me.
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.
Seems like they have a good idea for a phone and want to fund the development using "pre-orders" (aka a Kickstarter). I went through the website and all the marketing and watched the launch video to find out how this thing works, but all I see is the same rendered home screen and lots of promises. Even in the video they show plenty of models of the phone lying around but not a single shot of one turned on and working.
I really do hope they succeed, and will definitely buy one if it turns out to be a viable product, but not before that.
I have a Clicks Keyboard and love it. As far as I can tell the team behind the Clicks are pretty intertwined with https://www.fxtec.com/ - in that FX Tech staff seem to be involved in Clicks support, etc.
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)
By mapontosevenths 2026-01-032:39 I have the clicks keyboard for the iPhone 16. I haven't used the older one, but I can say its a very solid product as well.
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.
By solaire_oa 2026-01-032:591 reply I can confirm, this is sensible advice. I backed the FxTec Pro 1x during a depressive period in depths of COVID. It took ~years of hamstringing for them to deliver, but they did eventually deliver the phone. Even aged as the phone is, it's really well designed, and I occasionally use it with Claude from my couch in the evenings.
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.
Pro 1x also has pretty solid Droidian compatibility, so it can run a full on Linux.
By solaire_oa 2026-01-0316:12 I wasn't aware of Droidian, this looks great, thanks!
Indeed. I am highly skeptical of kickstarters (and their ilk) outside of a small subset which is mainly forms of art. Art is something you ought to know for sure if you can achieve it before launching your kickstarter. (And even if the album/photo book/whatever doesn't turn out exactly how you imagined it, you can still give the backers some art of equivalent value.)
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.
By mbreese 2026-01-0220:19 Because of their existing product lines, I look at this more like marketing or market research. I'm pretty confident that this will actually be made. For one, the company actually has experience making and selling devices. This is a bit more ambitious than an accessory keyboard, but it's at least experience making something. Second, the pre-order reservation is about half of the full pre-order price. Unlike most Kickstarters where you have to front 100% of the money.
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.
By hasperdi 2026-01-0221:23 looking at this https://youtu.be/u7Uz1YZ5hQA?t=309&si=LvSzi7vXmUCJ2LY3 I think they're in mocking/prototyping phase at the moment.
