Revival of Blackberry nostalgia and keyboard fuels smartphone startups

The Clicks Communicater smartphone on display. Startup Clicks Technology makes a Blackberry phone. Clicks When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, physical keyboards quickly lost ground to touchscreens and faded from mainstream smartphones. Now, a new wave of startups, including U.K.-based Clicks Technology and Chinese firm Unihertz, is bringing them back and carving out a niche for phones with tactile buttons. The shift away from buttons once seemed final. Blackberry, long known for its keyboard phones, stopped producing hardware in 2016 and shuttered its software services in 2022. But fans of its squarish phones with its signature keyboard remain loyal to the brand. The r/Blackberry subreddit has 25,000 members who share tips and nostalgia for the devices. The renewed interest reflects a broader pattern, said Jung Younbo, a communications professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "We tend to use our smartphones as a kind of means to express ourselves," said Younbo. As phones become more embedded in daily life, trends around them increasingly resemble cyclical fashion trends, he added. For some users, the appeal is less about nostalgia and more about control. Clicks Technology's co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Gadway, said about 45% of their customer base has never used a phone with a physical keyboard. "They look at this not as a nostalgia play, but as an entirely new way to use their phone that's more intentional," he told CNBC. …