Accessory company Clicks makes cases with integrated physical keyboards for select phones, but they’re almost comically long and tough to fit in a pocket. The new Clicks Power Keyboard solves this problem and offers wider compatibility. It’s a magnetic physical keyboard you can snap to MagSafe iPhones or any Qi2 Android device, turning them into old-school BlackBerries of sorts. When you don’t need the keyboard, just take it off. It connects via Bluetooth, and that means you can also use it with other smart devices, like TVs, when you want to enter a password. You can pair it with up to three devices.
The keyboard can extend to various lengths to accommodate small or big phones, and you can rotate the Power Keyboard sideways and shorten the length to use the keyboard with your phone in landscape mode. Since it’s not integrated into a phone case, the Power Keyboard has bigger keys and a dedicated number row, which makes typing on it a little easier. It can also work as a power bank in a pinch, but the capacity is low, and it charges the phone very slowly at 5 watts, so it’s best to just save that juice for the keyboard itself. It costs $109 and goes on sale in the spring, but you can preorder it now.
That wasn’t the only exciting thing from Clicks at CES. Clicks is now a phone company, too. The Clicks Communicator is a proper Android phone, one that’s designed to be a second phone that specifically focuses on communication. (I was only able to play around with a dummy prototype model.) Load it up with your favorite messaging apps and type away—you can even use the selfie or rear cameras for video calls. The company partnered with Niagara Launcher to make the home screen look more unique than the typical spread of app icons.
The Communicator supports a physical SIM or eSIM, has a headphone jack, 256 GB of storage plus a microSD card slot, Qi2 wireless charging, and NFC for contactless payments. It even uses silicon-carbon battery tech for the 4,000-mAh cell inside. Since it does have the Google Play Store, you can install anything you want on it—even TikTok, assuming it doesn’t look strange on the square-ish OLED screen. There’s a customizable killswitch on one side that turns on airplane mode by default, and the “Prompt Key” on the other side for voice dictation—a press and hold will enable voice memos.
Clicks doesn’t want to force you to limit your screen time with this secondary device, unlike similarly sized pocket devices like the Light Phone III or Minimal Phone. Instead, you’re in control and can customize what you want to use it for; nothing is stopping you from making it your primary phone. It’ll get two Android OS upgrades and 5 years of security updates, though the company is exploring other chip options to widen the OS update window. It costs $499, and you can reserve it now, with an expected launch date later this year.