Get to know your new phone away from the phone

The Unihertz booth at MWC was a bit remote, but those who found everything seemed to want to catch it Titan Elite 2. The cosmic orange color certainly caught attention, and the QWERTY keyboard reminded one showgoer of an old BlackBerry. But once I picked it up, I realized why it was so popular. It’s thin, lightweight, pocketable, and only requires the pressing of physical keys. I felt unrestrained, which I can’t say about the phone I’m currently using. I didn’t want to let it go, and judging by the steady stream of visitors I saw at the pavilion, I wasn’t alone.

As usual, MWC has come up with a bunch of weird and delightful ideas about phones that aren’t just slabs of glass and aluminum. This year I saw Telephone with electric torch (It wasn’t working any time I tried to see it in action), phoned it DJI Osmo camera with gimbal attachedEven pet phones. Will any of these ideas prove successful in the long term? Maybe not, but it’s nice to imagine something different.

Among the exotic phones, another trend has emerged at places like the Unihertz booth: phones that aren’t your main phone. This isn’t an entirely new idea, but the concept of a simplified device that provides a better typing experience, or gives you a little vacation from the constant nagging of your regular phone, seems to be gaining traction.

In almost all cases, these are the phones that He could It’s your main phone, and Unihertz in particular has a lot of fans Using the company’s existing devices From here. The Titan Elite 2 runs Android 16 and Unihertz It promises OS upgrades up to Android 20. Watching vertical videos on a 4-inch square screen won’t be the best experience, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so. But the Elite 2 might be more appealing as a device when you don’t plan to watch a lot of TikTok videos — maybe if you want to discourage yourself from doing so, even.

There are some overlapping intentions behind the secondary phone concept, but they have one principle in common: creating some space between you and your main phone. If you want to spend less time on the weekends browsing and more time reading a book, you can put your regular phone away and use a secondary phone for texting and calling, while keeping it away from social media apps. Better yet, it’s okay for secondary phones to be kind of bad. If scrolling TikTok on your secondary phone is a terrible experience, you may be less tempted to do so.

The Titan Elite 2 will likely remind fans of QWERTY phones of He clicks on the communicatorWhich debuted earlier this year at CES. The concept is almost identical, although the two devices offer different typing experiences: the Unihertz keys are square and located right next to each other, side by side, and the click keys are separate and oval in shape. The clicks clearly advertise the Communicator’s capabilities as a second device, one better optimized for writing emails and messages than browsing social media. Like the Elite 2, it’s a full-featured Android phone (with a headphone jack and microSD slot!), so it can be your daily driver.

Light Phone III It’s a completely different device from the Communicator and Titan 2 Elite. Texting, calling, and some connected functions like calendar and navigation are basically all it can do. At the show, I spoke with Light’s co-founder and CEO, Kaiwei Tang, who has been focusing on creating simple phones for the past decade. He says 50 percent of Light’s customer base uses the phone as a primary device, while the other half treat it as a supplement to their full-featured smartphones. Tang sees demand growing as well. “In the last 10 years, we have grown every year, even though we have a zero marketing budget,” he says.

But there’s a huge elephant in the room: Is the answer to “I want to take a break from my phone” really… another phone? Will there come a day when this thing becomes a pair of glasses, a smartwatch, or some voice-controlled earbuds? Tang sees the appeal of a screen-free device, but he doesn’t think it’s realistic in the short term. “I love the voice UI,” he says. “I think this might be the future, but we’re not there yet.” He argues that we still need covert methods for input. The little screen you carry with you seems to be the way we all landed.

Another way is to make the simple phone part of your main phone. This has obvious disadvantages. If it’s Focus Mode or an app, there’s almost certainly an easy way to quickly turn it off and get back to your social media browsing habits. They flutter Latest device He has an interesting idea: a physical switch on the side of the phone that triggers a customizable “Moment,” with only access to the apps you’ve selected — and only certain people can interrupt you. The physical slider adds a little more friction than turning focus mode on and off in the quick settings.

However, this growing interest in small phones comes at an unfortunate time. You must have heard about the RAM crunch, and that’s it How bad is it for phone makers?. Phone prices are bound to rise, and when one The phone costs more, so you’ll probably think long and hard about buying two. There is no doubt that the situation is making it more difficult for small brands trying to break into the market with something new, and it does not look like the situation will improve any time soon.

However, the people at companies I spoke to this week didn’t seem hesitant. For Tang, it’s his customers that keep him going. “I am optimistic because most of my clients are young people,” he says. “We ruined my generation,” he added, laughing. “I feel like the next generation has a better sense of managing or making decisions that change the tools they use.” If he can muster some optimism given the challenges facing his company, I think it’s fair to keep hoping for more good things to come – whatever strange form they may take.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge