Its time to ditch your black slab
Recently I did a highlight of various types of Sicko Phones and I have been thinking more about this over the course of the week since then. Lets start with a quick question. Can you work out which phone is which in the image below?
Click here for Answers
Left: Google Pixel 10 Pro Middle: Samsung S25 Right: Apple iPhone 17
Thats right I'm sure you had the look at the answers in order to work out which phone is which. Compare this to smartphones even 10 years ago and the phones have a distinctive face as well as a distinctive shape.
Left: Google Nexus 5, Samsung S5, Apple iPhone 6
This has got me thinking, what do you actually need a phone for, what is the main purpose of carrying this little pocket computer around. Heres what I came up with:
- Messaging Family and Friends (via WhatsApp and Discord)
- Emails
- Mobile Banking and Payments
- Balatro when riding the bus or the train
- Listening to Music and Podcasts
- Taking notes and reminders
- Navigation
- Bus Times
- Train Times
- Weather Forecast
- Looking things up
- Writing drafts for this blog
- Calculator / Conversion
Now this to me seems like yes a generic black slab would do all of these things, but my general philosophy in life is that time we get on of this earth is short and there for why do something the mundane way when you can do it a more fun way.
This is where the the sickos phones come in and looking down the list, the light phone, the minimal phone, the side phone, a lot of than do various amounts of these tasks but as I mentioned in my previous post one of the biggest downfall is that many of them want to cut you off essentially from everything that doesn't fit their narrative certainly if they work for you absolutely no shade but what I want is the opposite, I wanna connect to the internet, to WhatsApp, to Discord etc but I want to be able to go in and out as quickly as possible free of distractions (apart from when I want to play Balatro on the bus to work to kill time) this narrows the board significantly to two types of phones, qwerty keyboard phones and flip phones, and possibly a combination of a flip phone with a qwerty keyboard case.
I have used flips phones in the past and while I liked it, it wasn't for me, I wasn't too worried about the durability but the opening up to do short quick things, the thing I want out of the phone, was a big road block for me, although admittedly before they slapped a full size screen on the outside you can run full apps on so maybe especially paired with a clicks keyboard case a Razr 2025 would be the right device for me since you can now do those quick replies on the outside screen.
But realistically this leaves we two upcoming devices, the Clicks communicator and the Unihertz Titan 2 Elite, these two devices are very similar in a lot of ways but also have some core differentiators, Both of them have seemingly the same (but unconfirmed beyond comparing spec sheets) 4.03" AMOLED 1080x1200 display both of them run Android 16 and both have a qwerty keyboard but that is really where the similarities end.
Firstly the Unihertz is a slightly more compact device (height wise at least since we havent seen the side or back of the phone properly yet.) since there is no chin at the bottom of the phone. Secondly the keyboards themselves hark from different eras of blackberry, The Clicks keyboard is more similar to the Blackberry 8310 with its separated keys while the Unihertz is almost a perfect facsimile of the Bold 9900 keyboard which is kind of ironic considering Clicks has Joseph Hofer on their team who literally designed the Blackberry Bold 9900.
The Clicks also has several other "Classic" features such as a Headphone jack, a Micro SD card slot and a notification LED it just seems like an overall more thoughtful device. On top of that Unihertz does not exactly have the best track record when it comes to support or project longevity, while they have committed to 5 years of updates for the elite its hard to put much stock in that right now. Meanwhile the clicks team is a US based company with some very prominent faces on the team such as Micheal Fisher aka Mr Mobile and Kevin Michaluk aka Crackberry Kevin it would be a huge reputation hit for them to not support this device properly with the promised software updates.
Top Left: Unihertz Titan 2 Elite Top Right: Clicks Communicator Bottom Left: Blackberry Bold 9900 Bottom Right: Blackberry 8310
The biggest thing I am just excited for though it be finally rid of Apples horrible autocorrect on the iPhone, while I still think I can probably type faster on an softkeyboard especially an iPhone in terms of raw words per minute at this point I think the hardware keyboard of a clicks or the unihertz I would get the job done quicker given the fact that the autocorrect wouldn't be getting in my way "correcting" words that I typed to words I didn't even type.
So I recommend that you also have a think about what you truly need out of your tiny pocket computer and if there is a more fun way to go about doing it. Obviously the Clicks or the Unihertz aren’t for everyone but I think there is a large proportion of us Sickos out there who these devices are perfect for.
Last Edited: 1 month, 2 weeks ago.