Clicks, a new smartphone accessory, adds a manual keyboard to the phone, letting users make full use of the screen.Courtesy Clicks
A manual keyboard on a smartphone? No, BlackBerry phones haven’t made a miraculous return. Instead, a new company called Clicks, based in the United Kingdom, has developed an accessory that pairs a manual keyboard with an iPhone.
“In the transition to touchscreens and people moving to modern smartphones, the benefits of buttons seem to get thrown out with the bathwater,” says Jeff Gadway, senior vice-president of marketing for Clicks, who is based in Waterloo, Ont. “The goal with developing Clicks was never to try to build a time machine and turn an iPhone into a button phone, but to say: ‘How can we take the best parts of buttons and bring them to a smartphone in the most modern way possible?’”
Clicks, which had its debut at CES 2024 in January and began shipping to customers at the beginning of February, is one example of a growing trend: merging analog functions with modern devices to create something novel and new. It’s an equation that resonates not only with older generations, who might still remember the joys of manual keypads on cellphones, but with young generations, too.
“I think that younger people are looking for something new and fresh,” Gadway says. “It’s fun and it’s a new way to interact with my phone.” Gadway says his Clicks-enabled iPhone has garnered a lot of attention from passersby since he started using it. “Phones all look the same and behave the same, but something like Clicks transforms the way your phone works,” Gadway says. He says that keyboard shortcuts that Mac and iPad users are familiar with, like CMD + A to select all text, can be used on the iPhone with Clicks. There’s also more usable screen space since a virtual keyboard can occupy up to half of a smartphone’s screen. “You get all of that screen real estate for whatever it is you’re creating or working on,” says Gadway.
Accessories like Clicks aren’t just about style, as Gadway notes. The satisfaction of tactile response is also an alluring feature, according to Jules Goss, an associate professor of OCAD University’s Faculty of Design. “There is something satisfying and pleasurable about having that haptic feedback,” says Goss. “Your ears are listening to that click.”
Goss describes another instance where the pendulum has swung back toward the analog side: car design. “There was a whole trend, for a while, of presenting you with a big slab of flat screen and virtual buttons,” Goss says. “It became fairly clear that drivers preferred the actual button.” Goss says that pressing virtual buttons requires drivers to keep glancing at the screen to see if the input was registered. “Whereas, in a button or a dial, the act of engaging with it is the feedback itself,” he says.
The trend works both ways, with analog devices getting modern upgrades. Fujifilm’s Instax instant camera, which launched in 1998, quickly became a hit for its ability to capture and immediately deliver a one-time physical photograph, when digital cameras were just beginning to pick up speed.
Fujifilm’s line of Instax cameras pairs the nostalgia of print photography with modern conveniences like LCD preview screens.Courtesy Fujifilm
Fast forward a few decades, and now the instant camera is getting a tech-forward makeover. The MINI Evo Hybrid Instant Camera, which launched in 2022, gets some digital functionality with a three-inch LCD screen to preview images, apply different filters and lens effects and choose which ones to print and share.
“It’s for the person who doesn’t fully want to commit to a completely analog device,” says Mark Montpetit, a director of marketing at Fujifilm Canada. “They’re kind of in both camps in this scenario. They don’t want to fully unplug.”
Products like Instax and Clicks are products that effectively straddle the line of old meets new, which is what makes them popular. “I think that Gen Z and Millennials have this love-hate relationship with digital technology,” he says. “They simultaneously love it, while also believing it is diluting their human relationships. They don’t like just retro for the aesthetics, but they like it also because of what it signals and how it makes them feel.”
Montpetit says that Fujifilm has been tapping into the digital-meets-analog trend for some time now, but when it comes to products like the Clicks keyboard for iPhones, Goss feels skeptical about manual phone keyboards making a full comeback. “I don’t see it as a trend that’s going to completely revolutionize our engagement with digital interaction,” he says.
Phone design, according to Goss, has the potential to change immensely over the coming years. It could be that the idea of a smartphone might seem, well, analog in a few decades. “We might look back in 20 years and we will laugh at how we used to carry around these little slabs in our pockets,” Goss says.