Blackberry-style Unihertz Titan Slim doesn’t impress reviewers

Unihertz’s latest boutique smartphone is the Unihertz Titan Slim. Unlike the full-screen phones that dominate the market, this phone marks another attempt to bring Blackberry-style QWERTY-panel phones into the smartphone era.

For some reason, Unihertz has never officially unveiled the phone on their website (there’s only this “coming soon”teaser image), but by now enough phone reviews have been published for the product to go public. Bear in mind that almost all of the reviewers who have tested the Titan Slim have left negative impressions, but at least it is a unique device.

This PCMag report details most of the specifications. On the front of the phone is a 4.2-inch LCD with a resolution of “roughly”1280×768, and then all those QWERTY buttons start. Since a hardware keyboard requires so much space, bezel reduction should be a priority. These days, even $150 smartphones have waterdrop front cameras and minimal bezels. Losing that much space means the display has an odd 5:3 aspect ratio, which several reports say causes issues with Android app layouts.

SoC: Mediatek Helio P70. It is a three-year-old SoC with four Cortex-A73 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores and an ARM Mali-G72 MP3 GPU built on a 12nm process. The software is outdated too; the phone comes with Android 11 20 months old. The device has 6 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage and a 4100 mAh battery. The main draw here is the price, which is “less than $300″(usually that means exactly $299.99).

PCMag lists dimensions of 5.79 x 2.67 x 0.51 inches (147 x 67.8 x 12.7 mm), making it the thickest phone of 2022. there is no room for a headphone jack or microSD card. These are odd omissions for a phone that seems to be designed for old-school use. However, Unihertz managed to cram in two physical SIM slots and an IR blaster.

The four-row QWERTY keyboard has a rather strange layout. The top row is just a bunch of function keys like Shift, fingerprint scanner, and Android navigation buttons. The entire QWERTY section of the keyboard is compressed into three rows, with a space separating the “V”and “B”keys. It seems that the first row of this keyboard should actually be the last row, with the space bar taking the place of the fingerprint reader. This would bring the layout in line with most Blackberries (and actual keyboards), which tend to start the QWERTY row at the top and fill the bottom row with function keys and the space bar. The QWERTY keyboard is the only selling point of this phone, and immediately compromising a layout like this is a bad idea.

MrMobile (also known as Michael Fisher) has posted a great review covering most of the main components of the phone. Fisher says the phone’s glossy plastic finish “feels cheap”and that the “Titan Slim pervades a sense of cheap compromise.”The screen has “bad viewing angles”and is not very bright. Fisher says the typing layout feels “cramped”and the weight distribution is “as heavy as it looks.”The rarity of physical keyboards means that Android doesn’t play well with them, and along with a bunch of other compromises, Fisher says the keyboard is “so uncomfortable and fussy that most of the time I just wanted to give up and put it back in its place.”it’s down.”

So it’s not great, but QWERTY enthusiasts don’t have many options yet. If you still don’t want to use the on-screen keyboard, Titan Slim is coming soon to the Unihertz Kickstarter store.