Titan Is the Spiritual Successor to BlackBerry, Complete with Keyboard

If you were a professional doing serious business stuff in the ’00s, then you absolutely had a BlackBerry on your hip at all times. In the days before smartphones ditched keyboards in favor of large touchscreens, the BlackBerry line bridged the gap between cell phones and pocket computers. It was king of the cell phone hill in large part because of the full QWERTY keyboard, which on-the-go types could use to type out important emails. Unfortunately, BlackBerry as a company is all but dead. Thankfully there is a new spiritual successor on the horizon, called the Unihertz Titan, and it brings back the QWERTY keyboard.

The Unihertz Titan just launched on Kickstarter, and is already well past triple its funding goal. It’s easy to see why, because Titan has a lot of desirable features you won’t find in other smartphones. The most obvious is the full QWERTY keyboard that features tactile buttons as well as touch control for swiping and scrolling. The keyboard even has a back light, so you can type out the details of that business merger from the comfort of your bed in the middle of the night.

And the Titan isn’t packing 10-year-old BlackBerry specs. It has the power to rival modern smartphones and run all of your apps with its eight-core 2GHz processor, 6GB of DDR4 RAM, 128GB of storage, and the Android 9.0 operating system. It’s not skimping on features either, and has dual cameras, a fingerprint reader, NFC, a host of sensors, dual SIM cards, and a 6000mAh battery for up to a week of life. If you don’t feel like using the QWERTY keyboard, there is also a large 4.5" 1400x1400 pixel touchscreen.

Most importantly for those of you who have a tendency to drop your phone on the hiking trail or into the pool, the Unihertz Titan is waterproof, dust proof, and shock proof. Like its predecessor, the Unihertz Atom, the Titan is designed to be rugged enough for real world use. It should work with major cell phones carriers in the US, Japan, China, and much of Europe.

If you want the Unihertz Titan, the Kickstarter campaign is running until August 29th. A single phone costs just $259, and rewards are expected to be delivered in December.