Screenshot via Clicks website.
A long time ago, I worked at an electronics retailer. The iPhone had already come out, but most people weren’t using iPhone-like smartphones yet. If you had a smart phone, it was most likely a Blackberry. Otherwise, you had a “feature phone.” It was like having a smartphone-lite. They often had large displays, but they were usually resistive displays, that is, pressure sensitive plastic. They were horribly inaccurate, and needed huge software buttons to work. Some of them, the coolest ones, had slide-out keyboards. They came in all shapes and sizes. Phones were still exciting back then, they weren’t all iPhone clones. Mine at the time, a Samsung Glyde, had a sweet landscape full Qwerty keyboard that slide out from the back.
It was awful, the worst phone I owned. That phone inspires both nostalgia and trauma for me.
Still, not all phones from the time were terrible. Blackberry holdouts held on to their phones and physical keyboards long after most people moved to iPhones and Android phones. They just couldn’t give up that physical keyboard. It had a following of worshipers. I was one of the early adopters of the iOS keyboard and, I have to say, even back then, it was pretty good. It made very few errors. As Apple tried to make it “smarter” over the past few years, autocorrect became horrendous, but it has improved slightly with iOS 17.
But what if that’s not good enough? What if you want a true old school experience. Retro is in, always has been, and the new retro might just be hardware keyboards. If you’ve wanted to use the entire screen for creating content on your phone or even working on spreadsheets, then a new company, Clicks Technology, has you covered. Their new iPhone keyboard, the Clicks, brings an ergonomic physical keyboard to the iPhone. But does it ask users to give up too much to ever succeed?
What is Clicks?
Clicks is a keyboard accessory for the iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro, and eventually the iPhone 15 Pro Max and possibly other models. The creators even say that it could spread to Android phones if there’s interest, and didn’t take the possibility of a keyboard for the iPhone 13 mini off the table.
The Clicks keyboard, the first product of Clicks Technologies, is a bit of a labor of love. Michael Fiser, aka: Mr Mobile, has talked about physical keyboards on his YouTube channel extensively. The company gathered talents from previous Blackberry and Apple engineers to build something that brings back the feel of a good physical keyboard. I emphasize “good” because, as someone who had a Samsung Glyde phone, not all keyboards were equal.
The accessory is marketed specifically as a keyboard, not a case. It attaches to your phone with a silicone cover, but Clicks Technology is careful to mention that it does not provide much in the way of protection. It’s lightweight and easy to slide off and on. The hardware keyboard uses about 2% of your battery life a day, with the backlight off, and does allow wireless charging as well as passthrough charging. However, don’t expect MagSafe support.
They keyboard itself has a few welcome additions, including a backlight, command key, symbols, and even a voice input key, for quick voice messaging. You can use keyboard shortcuts, like the spacebar to scroll down a page, or copy and paste. Many of the shortcuts available to iPadOS are in iOS as well, we just don’t use hardware keyboards with the iPhone as much to think about it.
The keys have a diminutive 0.22mm of travel. However, compare that to the 0.00mm travel of your screen. That tiny amount of travel is enough to reduce the chances of typos. Also, because you’re using a hardware keyboard, you can more easily type words that iOS doesn’t recognize, and avoid the issue of overzealous autocomplete and autocorrect, which frequently mess up the messages you’re trying to send.
Drawbacks of the Clicks
It’s 2024 and they’re releasing an accessory for the iPhone without MagSafe support. It’s a non-protective case… without MagSafe Support? Where have they been for the past three years? Playing with decade-old phones, perhaps. It’s been over three years! Three years! Even Android phones will have MagSafe through Qi2 soon! Who releases an accessory that disables MagSafe on the iPhone in 2024? It has become a vital part of what makes an iPhone an iPhone! That would be as stupid as blocking the TouchID sensor in the iPhone 5s!
Oh… a company did that? And they were also making an iPhone keyboard case? I wonder what happened to them. Then again, that keyboard died due to lawsuits, not lack of interest. Although, I never met anyone who used one, so perhaps it died for more than one reason.
There’s no battery on the case, you can’t use MagSafe, the “cover” isn’t actually protective (and you can’t use a case with it), it’s incredibly tall, and it doesn’t work with pass-through CarPlay or even pass-through audio. That’s right, the phone for creators has no support for wired headphones or microphones. Taking wired headphones away from video creators is a bold choice. Have they not seen a TikTok video lately? Lousy wired headphones are the “must have” accessory of Gen Z because—to content creators—having a good microphone is more important than quality listening.
There’s something else we have to talk about. The elephant in the room. Or, rather, the giant chin full of buttons at the bottom of your phone. It makes your device between 62g and 65g heavier, and between 44mm and 41mm larger than the iPhone. That’s around an 1.75 inches, for the largest model. The iPhone is already a giant boat with the “small” iPhone serving as a phablet. Now it’ll be even larger. They recommend #ButtonsOut, and wearing your phone with the keyboard sticking out of your pocket with pride.
Will it Succeed?
Screenshot via Clicks website.
I don’t like to put predictions in writing because then it’ll be a permanent record of being wrong. I’d love to try one of these out on my iPhone 13 mini. The only real drawback of the iPhone 13 mini is how the keyboard takes up significant space on the screen. Not with this. And, because the mini is already a human hand-sized phone, adding the additional ~40mm won’t make it an 8-inch tall monstrosity. The Clicks height is the equivalent of having an 8.6-inch display on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The iPad mini is shorter than the iPhone 15 Pro Max in this case, and has an 8.3-inch display. Your phone will be larger than a tablet, but only because it’s so tall.
No, it won’t succeed. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s very neat, but people don’t like neat gadgets and this one is a whopper, literally. It’s a giant. The iPhone is not the right shape for this product. Their first model doesn’t work on all iPhones, won’t work for Android phones—which desperately need a hardware keyboard—won’t work with wired headphones or wired CarPlay, and doesn’t support MagSafe. It’s also $139 for the iPhone 14/15 Pro model, and $159 for the iPhone 15 Pro Max. A slide-out keyboard that doesn’t require so much compromise might work, but this is too niche to ever succeed. It’s asking users to sacrifice too much for minimal benefit.
There’s one chance for this thing, and it’s TikTok. If it could go viral as a creator’s tool on TikTok and Instagram, it has a shot. However, without MagSafe, which creators use as the tripod and mounting point for lighting and other accessories, or audio support that is also necessary for video, it just won’t live past fad status, even if it becomes popular. It’s just not a practical thing, especially for creators. Hell, it blocks the bottom microphone, pointing it towards the front of the device, which will affect audio quality. Not that it would matter if not for the fact that there’s no wired audio support. There’s so much working against it. There’s a chance, I’ll admit, but it’s extremely unlikely.
If you have one of their supported iPhone models and really need a keyboard more than literally any other iPhone accessory, grab it fast. The last time a company tried this it didn’t end well for them either, and phones actually fit in people’s pockets back then.
If you’d like one, the iPhone 14 Pro model will ship by February 1st. The 15 Pro in mid-March and the 15 Pro Max model sometime in “early spring.” It comes in two colors, a yellow and black model called BumbleBee and a bluish gray model called London Sky, which, honestly, is a pretty funny jab at U.K. weather. No other phones are supported at this time.
I’d buy one to try, but, honestly, the chances of them lasting long enough to release a model for an old iPhone 13 mini is slim to none. You’d think they’d have some solidarity with those of us stuck in the past.
Sources:
- Clicks
- Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica
- Scharon Harding, Ars Technica
- Wesley Hilliard, AppleInsider
- Roman Loyola, MacWorld
- MrMobile [Michael Fisher], YouTube