0. Introduction and background information

Let’s be honest up front: I love phones with physical keyboards. Like the following two which have been my daily drivers up until recently when it comes to the more modern Android phone and a much longer time ago when we’re talking about the Nokia:

A Nokia E72 and a Blackberry keyOne (click to enlarge)

Even the keyOne is already 9 years old by now and runs an Android 8.1 operating system, that has been end-of-life for ages already. At least the phone has no Spectre vulnerabilities, because it uses a slowish ARM processor that features a primitive, non-[speculative] [in-order execution pipeline], like the 486 and first Intel Pentium processors did.

Naturally, the Nokia is even older and was released in the year 2009, making it 16 years old by now. It looks more primitive, but with its Symbian S60 3rd Edition operating system, it is practically totally a smartphone already. It had an appstore, web browsers, email clients, banking apps, media player apps, all kinds of stuff that we know from Android and iOS.

But: The Blackberry and its Android 8.1 are slowly becoming more unusable, as many modern apps simply don’t support it’s aging platform. Many still do, but it’s getting worse. Plus, I somehow lost LTE connectivity (possibly because of the Android 8.0 -> 8.1 update), locking me into HSPA, so 3,5G. Then, our network operators collectively switched off all 3G tech, including HSPA. This left three options: GPRS/EDGE, LTE and 5G. My phone having lost LTE somehow and being too old for 5G was locked into EDGE!

Let me tell you something: In 2010, the Internet was pretty usable with EDGE, including web browsing. In 2025, with websites using monstrous JavaScript libraries, tons of stylesheets and really unintelligently compressed and sized images, it became mostly impossible. eMail, yeah, IRC maybe, but surfing the web? Forget it.

You’d be even worse off with the Nokia, which has an old Opera 12.0 Mobile web browser installed. Opera 12 (and its Presto engine) was one of the last browsers exclusively interpreting instead of natively compiling JavaScript to machine code. When Google came up with its Blink engine in Google Chrome and with it an actual machine code compiler, Opera quickly became obsolete (The current version is actually based on Google Chromium). This forced the Mozilla project to develop a similar compiler for their Firefox browser as well. Something Opera seemingly didn’t have the resources to do, which made the original company default (The current “Opera” is developed by a different, Chinese company).

This old browser can’t do modern cryptography, as it only supports the old TLS v1.0 protocol, old hashing algorithms and old ciphers. You can’t even load any modern websites at all. And even if you could in theory, it’d be way too slow to render the pages.

So I needed a new phone. But I still wanted a physical keyboard! And I got lucky: The Chinese company [Unihertz] had launched a [Kickstarter campaign] to fund their [Titan 2 smartphone]! And it looked very, very promising to me, so I decided to join up and help fund the phone, which was very successful! With a goal of HK $ 785,000 (around 87,000 €), it reached HK $ 16,358,594 in the end, or in other words: A bit more than 1.8 million €!

We can call that a success I suppose.

And last week, it arrived!

1. Meet the Unihertz Titan 2

Here it is:

It’s designed and made by a Chinese company, which I usually don’t like too much to be honest, but let’s face it: Modern smartphones are all “Made in China” anyway, so it doesn’t matter too much I guess, hoping that there at least won’t be any Chinese spyware installed on it. Can’t be sure of that though, so please keep that in mind!

The first surprise is the manufacturing quality. It feels really well-made, and the haptic feedback of the keyboard is leaps and bounds better than the ones on the Blackberry and the Nokia phones. I totally didn’t expect it to be so good! Aside from the mechanical part, the keyboard is also a capacitive input device, so you can use it for swiping and scrolling without having to touch the display. So you don’t have to clean it as often. Neat!

What else? You get a built-in, analogue FM radio with integrated antenna, which I like. Update 2025-11-06: Actually, this information is wrong! It does not have a built-in antenna, so the Titan 2 also relies on wired headphones being connected to become able to receive FM signals! End of update. Sadly though, there is no 2,5 mm headphone jack, so you have to use a bundled USB-C adaptor. That part is a bit meh. Also no waterproofing I suppose. I mean, the [unihertz.co.za] product page for the phone lists it as having been IP68-certified, but given that several other specifications on that site are just wrong (display resolution, battery capacity, amount of RAM, …) I guess that’s just a hoax or some mistake, because [unihertz.com] doesn’t mention any IP rating at all and their other specifications match my device perfectly.

What about cards? It has dual-SIM support, but there is no SD cardreader. So no extending your flash memory. It’s got way more than enough internal memory for my usecase though. Here are some specs:

• ARM big.LITTLE CPU by MediaTek with 4 × 2,5 GHz and 4 × 2,0 GHz cores
• 8 GiB of RAM
• 500 GB of internal storage
• A weird, quadratic display with a resolution of 1440×1440 pixels
• An even weirder secondary display on the back for displaying small things, such as time and date
• A huge battery with a whopping 5050 mAh of capacity (The Blackberry has a 3500 mAh one)
• 5G support
• They promise they’ll upgrade it at least to Android 17 (it’s currently running Android 15)

I was a bit worried about the width of the phone, but I can happily report that it does fit into my trouser pockets! I’m still using the clip-on case for protection though. Because, as usually the case, I didn’t manage to put the protective films onto the displays without air bubbles and dust particles caught under them, so I just took those off and threw them away.

And: How much does it cost? For the Kickstarter pledge it was just about 250 € including the old-fashioned clip-on case they offer you. The normal price for just the phone is quite a bit higher though: 400 € or USD $ 400 with  30 € / $ 30 for the optional case. Currently they sell the phone for a slightly discounted price of 380 € / USD $ 380, but that’s a time-limited offer. Still not all that pricey, given my Blackberry keyOne cost me about 650 €, while featuring a much lower quality keyboard and smaller battery.

I had my doubts about this thing, but after just a few hours of testing it, I decided to make it my new daily driver! Bye bye, Blackberry keyOne! It was nice using you, but… this is just way better!