New company Clicks Technology is debuting its eponymous Clicks keyboard as its first product for $139, which will be compatible with iPhones to start.
This is the 2nd launch from Clicks. View more
Clicks Communicator
Launched this week
Clicks Communicator is a compact Android 17 phone built around a physical keyboard and a home screen for conversations. Use it as your main phone or a companion, with full 5G and apps while keeping messages, typing, and quick replies close at hand.
Launch Team
Flowtica Scribe
Hi everyone!
There’s something nice about a phone that puts the keyboard back at the center.
Communicator is small enough that the screen clearly isn’t the whole point. The keyboard is touch-sensitive, the Signal LED tells you who’s trying to reach you, and the Message Hub lets you deal with conversations without opening every app one by one.
It still runs full Android 17, so you can use it as your main phone if you want. It just makes typing and messaging feel like the default again.
The side key handles voice input too. Hold it to dictate, record something, or transcribe a meeting.
Clicks also bumped the final hardware to 12GB RAM and a 4,350mAh battery before shipping, without increasing the $499 launch price.
Turns out, buttons still make a lot of sense!
@zaczuo Can you customize what the side key does, or is it mainly for voice input?
@zaczuo @david_turner12 side key (we call it the prompt key) is really geared towards communications. Today it triggers speech to text (when pressed and held) and also takes to directly to the message hub (single press). In the future we’re aiming to allow support for other functions, like bringing your own keys to other speech recognition or note taking platforms).
Immediately sent this to two friends and they were stoked. Excited to know what I'm getting them for Christmas / Hanukkah now!
I tried to message you on your website but didn't see a contact form so I'm sending a quick note here. Not a big deal, but your site promotes a $30 discount (which you are delivering). But the second step in the flow, where the user signs up for text, says that the discount is $20. Your marketing team might want to change that $20 figure on your Postscript SMS marketing tool to $30, just to avoid confusion.
@laurenproctor thanks for the heads up! Glad you’re excited and thanks for sharing.
Macaly
physical keyboard comeback is real, my thumbs miss this so much 📱 hows battery life holding up day to day?
Dial
a touch-sensitive keyboard is the part I hadn't seen before, most of these retro-keyboard phones treat the keys as pure mechanical input and bolt a trackpad-gesture zone onto the space bar at best. does the touch layer replace the trackpad entirely or is it additive, like can you still do cursor placement by dragging on the keys themselves the way BlackBerry's old keyboard-as-trackpad trick worked?
@galdayan yes! So the touch sensitive keyboard works in a few ways. Scrolling up/down through lists/pages. But also fine cursor control and text selection.
Dial
@jeff_gadway1 good, so it's additive rather than a replacement, that's the right call honestly. a pure gesture layer with no mechanical fallback would've been a harder sell for people who actually want tactile keys. does the scrolling gesture ever get triggered by accident while you're just typing fast, or is there enough of a pressure/duration threshold to tell a scroll swipe from a keystroke