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There are a lot of Phones Which looks towards the future in Mobile World Congress 2026But only a few take inspiration from the past.
The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is a pocket-sized phone with a physical keyboard that brings back BlackBerry nostalgia and offers plenty of new tricks to boot. It is the latest in a series of phones from Unihertz, yet Titan series similar to BlackBerry Passport.
Although the shift to glass touchscreens heralded by the original iPhone has brought much greater visibility and functionality into the mobile experience, a subset of tech fans yearn for… The past days of physical keyboards And the buttons that classic BlackBerry devices were famous for.
Modern accessory company Clicks has filled that old niche with physical keyboard cases, even debuting its own version of the BlackBerry. It’s a release He clicks on the communicatorwhich the Titan 2 Elite could compete with when they reach the market.
Just like the Communicator, the Titan 2 Elite aims to be a full-fledged smartphone with half the screen of a typical phone to make room for the keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite doesn’t have pricing or release details yet, but it will launch on Kickstarter next month.
In hand, the Titan 2 Elite is a delightful throwback. However, even a quick use of the 4.03-inch AMOLED touchscreen (1080 x 1200 pixel resolution) with a 120Hz refresh rate shows how modern it is, with smooth navigation and a home screen packed with apps. It’s a little thicker than today’s phones (esp Samsung Galaxy Edge and iPhone Air), but this only helps him rest better between my palms.
The big feature is the keyboard, which has a full QWERTY layout and reminds me of the old BlackBerry Curve.
However, while that old phone used a rolling ball to control the cursor, the Titan 2 Elite has a great solution – all of its physical keys use capacitive sensing. I literally moved my thumb up and down on the keyboard, and watched the screen scroll up and down as if I had made the same motion on its touchscreen. It’s a gesture borrowed from some of the final BlackBerry phones of the 2000s, and was featured in some of Unihertz’s earlier Titan phones.
The tactile keys are a pleasure to use, and the function cleverly avoids one of the biggest pitfalls of using a physical keyboard, namely less display space. If my thumb doesn’t block the screen by swiping over the keys, it doesn’t matter that it’s half the screen size on most modern phones.
There’s another swipe trick with the capacitive keyboard as well. You can set it so that the left side moves the cursor while the right side continues to scroll up and down, and then simply click anywhere to the right to “click” the cursor, allowing navigation like a mouse. Who needs a BlackBerry-style scroll wheel?
The Titan 2 Elite has two 50-megapixel rear cameras and a 32-megapixel front camera.
Admittedly, this feature was a little difficult to implement. I’m told the Titan 2 Elite models shown off at MWC are running a beta version of the final software, so this could improve when the phone launches.
But wait, there’s more. You can dive into the settings and set long presses on each key as app shortcuts — for example, setting the “Y” key to open YouTube. This functionality means owners have more than 26 shortcuts, although there is a physical button on the right side of the phone that can be designated as its own shortcut.
Aside from the keyboard, the Titan 2 Elite has specs to rival any other smartphone: either a Dimensity 7400 chip or a high-end Dimensity 8400 chip, 256GB of storage (expandable up to 2TB, Unihertz said), two 50MP rear cameras and a 32MP selfie camera.
Travelers will love the dual physical SIM slots and single eSIM. It launches with Android 16 and promises five years of software and security updates. It comes in black and newer colors iPhone 17 Pro-Orange pattern. Somehow, someone managed to cram a 4050 mAh battery into the device.
The only mystery is how much memory will be included in the models headed to Kickstarter backers.
Unihertz told me that Lack of RAM The huge rise in prices created uncertainty about the amount that would be allocated to production units. For what it’s worth, the demo units I used had 12GB of RAM and 12GB of “memory extension,” though it’s unclear what that means. It’s possible that this feature borrowed temporary memory from storage, which is a trick I used some budget phones.
If the released Titan 2 Elite had the same functionality as the one I played, I would consider it a throwback that is also a practical and well-designed smartphone. I wish more phone makers would take this inspiration from the past.