Unihertz makes a bold move with its curvy new phone, a reinterpretation of a classic design that old-school smartphone fans definitely still carry a torch for. The Titan Pocket may leave you with some Qs as to why the company is working off such an old playbook, but there’s a niche group of keyboard fans who will find this to be a real pearl of a gadget.
B(l)ack(Berry) to the Future
QWERTY-keyboarded phones used to hold a huge place in the market, and in people’s hearts. Before touchscreens became (literally) huge, physical keyboards were the best way to input data, and they still have their fans. For one thing, you can use physical keys unseen, typing only by feel and muscle memory in a way you can’t with a virtual keyboard.
Unihertz specializes in quirky phone designs, like the tiny Jelly 2. Last year, it rolled out the Titan, a QWERTY phone that many people found unusably large: It’s 3.66 inches wide and weighs 10 ounces. The Titan Pocket, on the other hand, is very close to the size of 2014’s BlackBerry Classic, though it’s still larger than the legendary BlackBerry Bold.
The company uses Kickstarter as a presale platform, but this isn’t a crowdsourced phone. Kickstarter is just how Unihertz drums up interest, as it doesn’t have much of a marketing budget. The phone will cost $299 after the presale period, but for now you can get it at a (frequently shifting) discount.
Rocking an Industrial Look
The Titan Pocket is a solid lump of phone. On the back, an “H” of metal surrounds soft-touch plastic. The top and bottom are rubbery. And on the front, there’s a perfect little keyboard surmounted by a 3.1-inch, 716-by-720 screen. That’s smaller than the BlackBerry Classic (4 inches) but larger than the Bold 9900 (2.8 inches). Unihertz says the body is “drop resistant” but not water resistant.
At 7.61 ounces, it’s heavier than your old BlackBerry Classic but still within comfortable holding weight, and at 2.88 inches wide, you should be able to type one-handed. The square screen is very rare among Android phones, but I’m happy to say that it didn’t actually crash any of the third-party apps I tried.
Unihertz got the design really right here. The phone is an homage without being a copy. The rivets and gray metal-and-plastic back don’t look like any previous device, but the whole package takes you straight back to 2008. Speaking of which, the phone has a notification LED, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and even an IR blaster.
The keyboard is probably as close as you can get to a BlackBerry Bold without getting sued. (With good reason: BlackBerry has sued others.) The keys are sculpted so you can tell them apart by touch, with frets between each of the three QWERTY rows and the top function row. They’re sculpted differently than the classic BlackBerry keyboard, with shapes that lean up and out. There’s no dedicated number row; you press the Alt key to get a number, and a Symbol button to pop up a menu of punctuation.
The top function row also has dedicated Back and multitasking buttons, and a Home button that houses a physical fingerprint sensor. The Function key, as well as a big red button on the side, can be used to launch apps or perform several other actions.
Coverage on Every Network, and Worldwide
The 4G Titan Pocket works on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s networks, with some caveats. It supports voice-over-LTE and voice-over-WiFi on all three carriers. I tested the phone on AT&T.
The phone is dual-SIM, with an unusual tray that supports either two SIMs or one SIM and a microSD card. Plenty of international bands are present, making this an excellent travel pho.
On AT&T, signal was good; data speeds, not so much. The Titan Pocket has all of AT&T’s coverage bands but lacks frequency bands 29 and 30, which add speed, and its inexpensive chipset only supports 2×2 MIMO. That meant it pulled down 30Mbps rather than the 150Mbps I got on a flagship phone in the same location.
On T-Mobile, coverage will be more of a concern than speed, as the phone lacks the rural band 71 (but has all of T-Mobile’s other 4G bands). On Verizon, the phone lacks the relatively new and obscure high-speed band 48 but should get fine coverage.
Call quality, I’m happy to say, is spot on. On AT&T, it was crystal clear. The 89.6dB earpiece wasn’t blaringly loud, but it was loud enough, while the 98.4dB speakerphone is among the loudest I’ve tested recently. The phone works with both 3.5mm and USB-C headsets—I tested it with some OnePlus USB-C earbuds—as well as Bluetooth headsets.
Designed for Texting, Not Gaming
This is a $300 phone, so roll back your expectations accordingly. The Titan Pocket uses a Mediatek Helio P70 processor, which operates at around the performance of Qualcomm’s 600-series. There’s 6GB of RAM and 111GB of available storage; you can add a microSD memory card if you forgo dual-SIM use.
Benchmark results are what you’d expect from this chipset. Geekbench results of 299 (single-core) and 1426 (multi-core) are in the vicinity of a Samsung Galaxy A31 or A41. The Basemark web browsing score of 227.59 is surprisingly high because of the small screen, but it’s still below even high-midrange phones like the LG Velvet (302).
What this means is that for basic calling, texting, browsing, and listening, the phone is absolutely fine. This is a messaging and email machine, and it runs all the messaging and email apps you want.
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Games don’t work well for various reasons. One is processor power: Genshin Impact, the highest-stress game we play, stuttered and skipped. But the hardware and software just make games weird. When I tried playing Alto’s Odyssey and Mini Metro, the on-screen text was nearly unreadably small because of the way the phone handles telling apps about the screen’s density. The games are playable, but it’s far from ideal. Videos also look really small and odd at 1:1.
Battery life is excellent. There’s a chunky 4,000mAh battery that gave the phone 11 hours, 10 minutes of video streaming in our test. Running games significantly shortens that screen-on time, though.
Cleverly Adapted Android
Unihertz loads its Android 11 build with a launcher called Quickstep, which has a simple 4-by-3 icon grid over four quick action icons. You can load another launcher, of course. I went with the BlackBerry launcher, which puts more quick action icons at the bottom of the screen.
Since the keyboard is so prominent, Quickstep makes good use of it. You can assign applications or shortcuts to short or long presses of any letter on the keyboard, so you can hold M to text mom, or hit C to jump to Chrome. Holding down the Function key makes these shortcuts work even in third-party apps, giving you 52 instant ways to jump to anything you want to do. That’s delightfully powerful.
There are also a bunch of tweaks to make third-party apps work better. Although many games by default try to force the screen into landscape, you never actually have to hold the phone sideways; instead, there’s a utility to lock individual apps into portrait mode. A “mini mode” forces the screen into a 9:16 portrait format for apps that can’t handle 1:1, but it’s really tiny.
The less said about the 16MP main camera and 8MP front-facing camera, the better. They disappointed me all around. Even in good light, my test photos were on the dim side and colors looked dusty, like there was a retro-vibe filter that I couldn’t turn off. Some of my shots had focus issues. In low-light photos and videos, objects are barely visible, and there’s no Night mode.
A Perfectly Targeted Niche
There’s genuinely nothing like the Titan Pocket. OnwardMobility’s supposed BlackBerry reboot has vanished into mists of mystery, the original Titan is unusably large, and the old BlackBerry Key2 series have hit end-of-life.
I think most people have moved on from QWERTY phones. I certainly have, even though 12 years ago I wrote a piece about why I hate touch screens. Tactile feedback is indeed great, and touch screens are an artificial interaction. But the entire smartphone app world is now designed for a big-screen experience, so the Titan Pocket form factor only works for limited applications (mostly, messaging and web browsing).
That all said, Unihertz has clearly put love and thought into its resurrected QWERTY device. With a beautifully designed keyboard and dual-SIM support at a terrific price, it’ll make a very specific kind of person very happy.
