The Clicks keyboard for the Motorola Razr looked like the perfect product for someone such as myself, someone bored with consumer tech who used to have a passion for it. Being able to use the full external display with a physical keyboard would be like bringing back Blackberry phones in a modern package. Only now, with improved software, a larger screen, and a much larger screen for content that demands more space. I was so excited to finally see something innovative in tech.
Unfortunately, the makers of this keyboard were so obsessed with copying Blackberry that they brought its mistakes to the modern era too. They keyboard came fresh out of 2007, ignoring the improvements we’ve made to keyboards in software form. What’s left is something that will feel inadequate and unfamiliar to most modern cellphone users. If you weren’t a Blackberry addict, you will experience a huge learning curve with this that will push you away. If not that, it’ll certainly be the bugs or lack of customization. I tried to give it a chance, I called it one of the most exciting things in tech right now, but it feels like Clicks already abandoned it. I may not be far behind.
In This Article:
The Hardware
Could you imagine if the Clicks keyboard didn’t feel great to type on? It would be wild. Fortunately, that’s not the case. The keys? They’re clicky. Just a perfect level of tactility. You can tell they spent a ton of time dialing in the pressure required to press the keys and the snappiness when you activate them. It’s a fantastic level of tactility. I say this as someone who had a phone with a keyboard before I could finally afford an iPhone. This is a good keyboard feel. But it’s not perfect.
My first complaint is that it doesn’t feel like there’s really a good place to press on these keys. The Blackberry keyboard similarly had angled edges to direct your fingers to each side, but that’s not really how typing works. Take it from someone who can hit 60wpm on this thing, that’s not how fast typing works. You don’t delegate one thumb to each side of the keyboard, you fly around on that thing. Some directionality in the keys can help you find your bearings, but it can go too far. Without a flat surface at the height of the key, it feels like your fingers are always directed to the edge of a key. That makes every press feel like it’s on the edge of a key, the source of typos on most keyboards. It just feels wrong.
I did find that eventually I didn’t think about precision as much, and didn’t make as many mistakes as I thought I would. I chalk that up in part to the spacing between the keys and their round shape. But it never feels very comfortable to use, even as I got used to it. I hate to admit it, but I almost felt comforted going back to mashing glass on my iPhone. I love the tactility of this keyboard, the clickiness of the keys, but something about the contoured key shape themselves just makes it a little uncomfortable for me. I was always more of a fan of the rounded shape on the keys of the Palm devices at the time. If it were a computer’s mechanical keyboard, I’d say I love the switches, but am not a huge fan of the keycaps.
They added some weight to the bottom of the keyboard to help you find balance, but the Razr is a tall device unfolded, it’s not quite enough. Using this keyboard with the full Razr screen doesn’t feel ideal. However, it’s perfect when the lid is closed. And since Motorola almost lets us use the outside display as much as the inside one, it’s perfect for those who want to just have a small phone with a physical keyboard.
Non-Typing Stuff
The keyboard portion has a magnetic back for Qi2 and MagSafe chargers, but you can’t charge with this. First, I’m not even sure my version of the Motorola Razr could, as the wireless charging barely works on this model. The slightest case would be enough to disrupt it, even without other issues. However, Motorola’s phones turn off charging via Qi when a USB-C device is plugged in. Clicks could have added their own magnetic coil to the back, and routed power through the USB-C port, but that may have been too complex for this model.
The kit also comes with a case for the top portion of the flip phone. I personally don’t use this. First, it’s plain black, and I love that my Razr is a bright, colorful red. Secondly, it’s made for the 2024 model of the Razr, which moved the microphone hole to the other side from my 2023 model, so it would cover my microphone at the top. Finally, it adds a lot of bulk, and I just didn’t want that. Fortunately, they didn’t make using it a requirement, you can just stick it on if you’d like. I chose not to.
Keyboard Layout
I was typing up a post on Bluesky when I realized I was just over the 300 character limit. No worries! Some of those sentences had the conjunction “and.” And, as we all know, you can replace “and” with an ampersand, “&,” to save two characters. So I went to type one.
With the Clicks keyboard, I couldn’t. I had to pull up an on-screen keyboard for a single ‘&’ character. This wouldn’t be a big deal. After all, a few of the buttons are customizable. Surely I can make that idiotic Gemini button an ampersand, right?
Wrong.
All I could do is turn Gemini off. Some apps will even read it as a “-” character. So instead of being able to write “&,” I have two “-” keys. Real useful there, Clicks!
Part of the problem with this keyboard is it was designed after a keyboard that came before Qwerty typing literacy really took off. It was designed to be somewhere between a phone keypad and a keyboard. The phone-like setup of 9 keys to represent the numbers 1-9 in a square, 3×3, with a 0 key below it, was to emulate the far more familiar phone keypads of the time. But modern phones don’t worry about that except for dialing the phone.
Clicks wanted to copy the Blackberry keyboard so badly they didn’t even ask themselves why it was designed that way. It was lazy. The modern smartphone user would expect 1-9, then 0 on the top row of keys. This is how it is in a software keyboard, and more closely emulates a full Qwerty keyboard. Then the other symbols could be closer to where they’re expected as well, either as a third layer, or simply below the keys. The bottom row doesn’t need so many modifier buttons either, especially since they can’t be customized. If perhaps we had layering and could use them to make our own custom layouts, that would be one thing. But we can’t. As a result, the keyboard feels unfamiliar to most of the under-40 crowd, the people who would want to buy something like this to better caption their videos on Instagram or TikTok, a key purpose Clicks advertised for their keyboard.
Looking at the iPhone 17 model of the Clicks keyboard, it seems they finally figured this out, and have been shipping a better iPhone keyboard since the iPhone 16. The top row is a number row, as you’d expect, with symbols under that. And the X key? Press the symbol key for that and you get an “&.” This extra space was made, in part, because they realized that they needed the capability to type an “&” more than they needed a dedicated “.” key. After all, many operating systems can treat a double space as a “.” anyway. It’s a shame that they’ll never be able to update the physical keys on the Clicks for Razr I own, but the least they could do is let me make the Gemini key do something useful, like type up a few symbols.
The Software
The first issue I encountered with the Clicks keyboard was the fact that I couldn’t type any word with double letters in it. As it turns out, there’s a keyboard setting in Android called “bounce keys,” which I had to find and turn off on my own. Even if it’s outside of the control of Clicks, a notification telling me I’d have to do this as part of setup would have been nice.
Next was the external display typing area. By default, the external display will show a single line of text, taking up the full screen, for typing with the on-screen keyboard. Even when you have an external keyboard, this is still how this view shows up. I had to find a way to make it possible to see the external display’s screen contents while typing, for messaging apps, especially. That required a hacky workaround, but one that, again, Clicks could have informed me of in a guide. I had to first open the emoji picker by pressing the 123 button and alt key together. Then tap the “Exit full screen” button at the bottom left corner of the external display. Then you can dismiss the emoji picker, which you, frustratingly, cannot move around the screen much, by pressing 123+alt again. It’s not in the settings where you’d expect it, but specifically part of the on-screen emoji picker.
Then there’s the arrow key mode. Pressing 123+the search button will enable the WASD keys and the IJKL keys to become arrow keys. However, to exit this mode, you have to type any key that isn’t one of those eight keys. It will also actually type that character you press. Your best bet is the Control key, as this doesn’t input something unless you press the 123 key before it. I wish it could be exited with a press anywhere, and that only the WASD keys were operating as arrow keys, so you could press the other side to exit.
Then there’s the issue of customization. You can do things like turn Gemini off, but you can’t make the key do anything useful. You can’t customize shortcuts either. There was ample opportunity here to make this a great shortcut keyboard, but instead, I never use the feature because it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The launcher commands specifically launch apps I don’t use, instead of ones I could pick or my default apps. It really felt like it was designed by someone who doesn’t use Android much, then dictated to either AI or a contractor to just slap something together. Anyone could have told you that these shortcuts didn’t have to be hardcoded, they could have been intents to launch your default apps instead.
Oh, and one last issue with the app? They didn’t even make the views scrollable so it could work on a smaller display. You know, like the outer display on the Razr that they made this keyboard for. The app has three views. I could fix it in a matter of minutes! How haven’t they gotten someone—anyone—to do this? Take it from an Android developer, this is an easy fix, they just chose not to do it.
Bugs!
There are plenty of bugs and issues with this keyboard. The most frustrating thing is that, despite at least one bug stopping the device from working properly per day, there still are no updates for this. It’s been months since the last update to the app, and the firmware has similarly never been updated in the months I’ve been using the keyboard.
First is the data mode. It turns off as soon as you turn it on. Trying to use the data passthrough mode to allow usage of your phone with Android Studio, for example, immediately kicks you off the device. Others have reported the issue persists in other usages, such as Android Auto. If you’re trying to use the USB-C port on the bottom of the keyboard for anything but charging, your best bet is to remove the keyboard. Right now, that port’s for charging only.
Next is a maddening issue with caps lock. Sometimes you can get stuck in caps lock. Pressing shift might exit you from it for a letter, but you’ll be back to all caps right afterwards. Unplugging the keyboard, ensuring caps lock is off on the software keyboard, and plugging it back in doesn’t fix it. Instead, I found the only way I could quickly fix it was restarting the device with the keyboard plugged in.
I’ve had the keyboard stop working entirely and even freeze up my phone itself, requiring a complete restart to unfreeze my device.
With all of these severe issues, you’d think they’d make fixing this a priority. Instead, it feels like Android users have been abandoned. It’s a shame, it’s the only place that can offer such a unique phone experience with an outer display, as Apple still hasn’t figured out how to make such a phone.
Typing Speed and Comfort
When I first got this, my typing speed was around the 20wpm mark. I think my grandma would have me beat. But after just a few minutes I was up to 30, then 40. Now I seem to average around 55-60wpm. On a full-sized keyboard, I can see anywhere between 110-140wpm, depending on the day, keyboard, keycaps, and what I’m typing. On my iPhone, I can pretty easily clear 80wpm, and that’s in a typing test with gibberish. I’m likely faster with real words and sentences because I can trust autocorrect more.
I’m a fast typer. I grew up in online games where that was how you communicated and you learned to do it quickly enough to get an idea across. I also write. A lot. And code. So when I say I hit a wall with the Clicks keyboard around 60wpm, a perfectly average typing speed (on a full-sized keyboard), I was disappointed in myself. Could I get faster eventually? Sure!
But why would I? I can’t even type a damn ‘&’! Plus they decided to waste an entire key on this for Gemini, which I couldn’t give a single shit about if I had food poisoning.
Why on earth would I keep trying to get faster with this?
Battery
Ever leave your phone down and find it later dead? Perhaps it wasn’t sitting on the charger properly. Maybe you left a video on. Or perhaps you left the Clicks case plugged in. Because leaving your phone in the Clicks, even if the phone is off and the Clicks keyboard’s backlight is off, will drain it far faster than if you left your phone outside of the Clicks.
I tested my Razr, allowing the battery to drain over a few hours in airplane mode. With the Clicks plugged in, my phone lost around 1.5% of its battery life every hour. That’s not a lot on its own, but if you’re using your phone all day, it could mean losing around 12% of your battery life to the Clicks, just for having it on your phone. Because, the same test without the Clicks keyboard plugged in drained the battery only 0.1667% per hour. The Clicks caused the Razr in airplane mode, untouched, to drain about 9 times faster than it should have. Something with this keyboard makes it horribly inefficient.
Overall
The Clicks keyboard tried to be a Blackberry in a world that has moved on to something better. The Blackberry keyboard worked, for its time, but we’re past that now. We have gotten used to more modern keyboards and our physical keyboards should reflect that. Clicks seemed to have figured this out, but only after they released this model, which, to this day, is still using this layout, despite a release for the Razr 2025 models.
The Clicks keyboard feels like it’s still in development. Something that’s a few months from release. A new keyboard layout, more customization options, and bug squashing is still necessary. This keyboard shows promise. But as it is now? It’s a battery draining, buggy, inefficient piece of vaporware. I can’t recommend it to Razr users. Maybe the iPhone version is better? I wouldn’t know. Despite them scoping out interest for the iPhone 13 mini a few years ago, they never decided to release a model for it, so I haven’t had a chance to test it on anything else. But for the Razr? As it is now in its buggy form? This isn’t worth your time.