Being a post about the Titan 2 I thought it would be fitting to compose this post entirely using the Titan 2! This, and the fact my delivery from Unihertz was delayed are the main reason I haven’t posted earlier.
Using the physical keyboard on this phone has been a leaning curve I really wasn’t expecting to be so steep. My typing speed is still much slower than I am on a touch screen phone however it is improving. I’ve also found that because I’m having to put so much concentration into the typing itself the quality of my writing is taking a hit. Bear with me on this one!
Starting at the beginning with the Kickstarter campaign; it wasn’t a smooth process. Updates were sporadic at best, and for whatever reason Unihertz didn’t capture shipping addresses through Kickstarter so they had to send out a survey to provide these details. Mine, and several thousand other backers then ended up on a “bad address” list which I suspect delayed my parcel. I never did get to the bottom of what was bad about my address as when I queried it my number was removed from the naughty list without a response. Nevertheless I received mine on the 10th of November.
The unboxing experience of the phone was surprisingly comprehensive. The phone came with a rubber case, a UK charging brick, a USB-C cable, a pre applied front and rear screen protector and a spare front screen protector. If only other brands included all that in their boxes!
Onto the Titan 2; my initial impressions were largely directed towards the form factor. I never owned or held an original Blackberry Passport so aside from a few videos I’d watched I didn’t know what to expect. The shape of this device is truly unlike anything else available on the market today. It’s shorter than most other phones, but considerably wider and thicker. If you’re a man it’ll just about fit in your front pants pocket but the bulge looks fairly ridiculous, I’ve resorted to carrying this in my back pocket which I’ve never done with a phone before.
The whole design is radically different to the glass rectangles we’ve grown accustomed to over the last decade or so. Obviously we’re got a full physical keyboard but the square screen is out of the ordinary too. Then there’s the “subscreen” on the back amongst the cameras. I’ve not got an awful lot to say about this, it displays the clock and a couple of widgets. I’ve barely used it.
My use case is a little different to the norm in that I root and “degoogle” my devices, so for me that was the first order of service. Thankfully it’s all doable on the Titan 2 and Unihertz don’t include a lot of bloatware on their devices so the whole process didn’t take too long.
Testament to the device, aside from typing, using the phone is basically indistinguishable from any other mid range Android phone. It’s fast, has plenty of storage and the display is bright and clear. The battery seems to last a really long time and the OS is well optimised, to the point where most nights I’ll wake up to the device being on the same battery percentage as when I went to bed. Surprisingly the screen has caused me zero issues. I had thoughts that my apps wouldn’t fit on the screen or things would look awkward but that just hasn’t been the case. In fact, in my usage at least, it’s been quite the opposite. Websites look better with more horizontal space and things just feel roomier. More text fits on a line and the experience feels a bit more akin to using a desktop. On paper a 4.5″ screen sounds tiny, but in a square form it feels a lot bigger, especially when typing as none of that screen real estate is being taken up by an on screen keyboard.
Leading us onto the star of the show, the keyboard. Admittedly my only other experience of a qwerty keyboard on a phone was with a Samsung chat 335, so I’m no die hard qwerty phone fanatic by any means. However I do spend a lot of time typing on phsical keyboards in and out of work so hopefully that gives me the credentials to weigh in on it.
Before I say anything negative about it I’d also like to say overall I’m just glad that this phone exists. It’s not like we have many other options in 2025.
Overall the keyboard is good. Typing feels great, with the perfect amount of resistance and bounce back to the keys so that the tactile experience is a joy. The size of the keys is good too, even for me with big thumbs. The layout however could’ve used more thought, and probably an extra row. Excluding the F key row, on a full sized keyboard you have 5 rows, and this phone is making do with barely 4. Half of the top row on the Titan 2 is dedicated to navigation, with only 3 being used as typing modifiers. To be honest I’ve got used to having the shift and alt keys at the top quicker than I thought I would, however having the space bar amongst the bottom row of letters was a terrible idea. It throws all muscle memory out of the window, combine this with the fact the key are in an inline formation rather than the standard offset means that the learning curve of typing on this device is fairly brutal. That being said, persist and you will get used to it and over time typing slowly starts to become enjoyable on this device and less like a chore.
My second gripe over this keyboard is the software “kika” keyboard. In lieu of a comprehensive set of symbol keys Uniherz have given us a sym key which triggers an on screen set of less frequently used characters to choose from. I don’t actually have a problem with this, but in order to do this you need to have the onscreen keyboard option enabled in settings. When you do this you end up with a bar that takes up around 1/5 of the screen for a spellchecker and a row of symbols that actually have a physical alternative so are completely pointless. I really hope this is improved upon in a future update. I’ve tried a myriad of alternative keyboards but unfortunately none work with this particular physical keyboard very well.
UPDATE: A dev and member of the unihertz community has released an open source keyboard developed for the Titan 2. It can be found here: https://github.com/palsoftware/pastiera/releases. It’s in it’s early beta phase, but so far I’m finding it handles the on screen element of the keyboard much better than “kika”.
From the ground up this device is very well suited to being a productivity device rather than one for media creation/consumption. Having a square screen helps with text, and gives you a lot of usable space but renders video in a tiny postbox. You really wouldn’t want to be watching Youtube or Netflix on that device, even though it can be done in a pinch.
The Titan 2 is a device you have to persist with to give it a fair chance. If I’d have used this for an hour and formed my opinion on it based solely on that I’d have probably put it back in the box and resold it. However if you persist, get through the learning curve and learn to work around some of the phones quirks and limitations you’re left with something quite special. I can almost guarantee I’ll never bump into another person with this device, and while it offers no real technical advantage over any other smartphone it is a really satisfying phone to use. Do I need a physical keyboard? No, definitely not. But it’s nice to have one, and variety in such a bland market can only be a good thing.
