I’ve been waiting for this toy since I pre-ordered it last winter and while 2 months late, finally the Clicks Universal Power Keyboard arrived. I’d pre-ordered it, waited patiently (well, impatiently), and finally held in my hands what amounts to a BlackBerry keyboard reborn as a slim MagSafe slab for the back of my phone. iOS, Android, Bluetooth to multiple devices, a built-in battery that can top up the phone it’s attached to. On paper, it reads like a love letter to everyone who spent any time on a Blackberry or Nokia E series phone. For those that have never seen these small keyboards, you type on them either using a single finger or how most of us use it which is to line your thumbs horizontally on the home keys with the rest of your hands under the phone keyboard. Your thumbs travel while your hands stay anchored. After a bit of practice many people type very fast using this input method. While I myself have no problem typing on a touch screen’s on screen keyboard, I am always faster on a physical keyboard. This may be one of the reasons I have a fleet of folding and other bluetooth portable keyboards.
Before we get into the keyboard itself, a confession. I have somewhere between five and ten years of thumb-typing muscle memory rattling around in my fingers. BlackBerry keyboards, the Titan Slim, the Nokia E61, E70 and E72, the whole lineage. I used to be well over 25 words per minute with my thumbs. It has, however, been more than at least five years since I last seriously used a keyboard of this shape, so I’m not coming in cold, but I’m also not coming in mid-season. Keep that in mind.
I’ve now lived with it for 2 weeks, and I want to share the honest early impressions, because I suspect I’m not the only one whose expectations needed a gentle reality check.
The good: it gets the important things right
Let me start with the positives, because there are genuine ones.
- The tactile feel is excellent. Keys have a satisfying, definite click with travel that doesn’t feel cramped. Whoever tuned these domes understood that a keyboard lives or dies by its feel.
- The layout is well-considered for thumb typing. Keys fall where your thumbs want them to, not where a committee decided they should go to save half a millimeter.
- There are tactile orientation indicators in most of the places that matter, the home row and a few reference points, which, as a screen reader user, I appreciate more than I can say. It is the difference between typing and hunting.
- The fold-out mechanism is clever. The keyboard slides out from under the phone and powers on when deployed, then folds away and shuts off when you stow it. No fumbling for a power button, no accidental battery drain in your pocket.
The not-so-good: where my thumbs keep asking “why?”
Here’s where the honeymoon gets a little bumpy.
- The non-letter keys are not where you expect them. Not where BlackBerry put them, not where the Titan Slim put them, not where the Nokias put them. Simple characters, period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, are elsewhere, and “elsewhere” is a polite word for “not under the thumb that has spent a decade reaching for them.” This has significantly increased the learning curve, and I’ll be honest: I still don’t have it down. My speed has cratered. I’m not the 25-wpm thumb ninja I once was; I’m the person backspacing three times to find punctuation.
- There are no dedicated arrow keys. For a sighted user, that is an inconvenience. For a screen reader user, it’s a genuine obstacle. Navigation, reviewing what you’ve typed, moving character by character through a form field, that’s the most common thing we do, and doing it via a Function-plus-alternate-key combo is technically possible but practically painful. It’s the kind of thing you do twice and then reach for the touchscreen instead, which rather defeats the purpose of a keyboard. To add insult to injury, the arrow keys have no tactile indicator which makes the Function-plus-alternate-key combo awkward and issue prone
- There’s a voice recognition or dictation button on the bottom right. On Android, it doesn’t work. So there it sits, a dedicated key taking up real estate, doing nothing. A waste, and a small but pointed reminder that “universal” sometimes means “designed with iOS first, Android if we remember.”. You also can’t reprogram it to do other things which would have at least made the key useful.
- The Android companion app has unlabelled buttons and I have been told the same is the case on the iOS version. I am not shocked, but I am tired. The blind community has been saying for years, label your controls, and yet here we are.
- The companion app is where you’d go to customise keys, but with unlabelled buttons , expect frustration.with no
- The built-in battery does charge the phone, which is a nice consolation when the typing experience is letting you down. At least your phone isn’t dead.
- Finally, I haven’t found a belt case that fits the phone-plus-keyboard combo, and the two together are a bit heavy.
Here’s the part that stings the most. I had a very specific fantasy for this keyboard. At work, I use an iPhone, and the password requirements there are the kind of thing a security team dreams up after reading one too many breach reports. What feels like Sixteen characters, mixed case, a number, a symbol, no dictionary words, no three consecutive characters from your previous password, and a fresh one every sixty days. On the on-screen keyboard with VoiceOver, typing one of these feels like assembling ikea furniture with mittens on. I’d hoped the Clicks would be my secret weapon: slide it open, thumb-type the monstrosity in two seconds, move on with my day.
It is not my secret weapon. The punctuation hunt alone, where is the exclamation mark, where is the ampersand, which modifier gets me the at-sign, turns a two-second password entry into a thirty-second archaeology dig. And once I’ve finally hammered the thing out, reviewing it character by character to fix an error or check I didn’t miss a character means navigating without arrow keys, which means Function combos, which means I’ve now spent longer than the on-screen keyboard would have taken in the first place. The Clicks Power Keyboard, which I’d pictured as my password liberation device, is just not great for that.
Would I Recommend it?
Between the password disappointment and the general punctuation relearning curve, the use cases I’d pictured, messaging, email, setting up accounts, logging into sites, don’t feel as likely now. When I’m fumbling for a comma or invoking a Function combo to move the cursor, the on-screen keyboard with TalkBack or Voiceover starts to look competitive again, and I never thought I’d write that sentence.
Should you buy it? If you have BlackBerry muscle memory and a high tolerance for relearning punctuation, and you value tactile feel above all else, yes. If you need fast, predictable navigation as a screen reader user, you likely won’t be happy with the arrowing experience and app experience until they address the app labelling.
For me, the Clicks Power Keyboard is a lovely object that I want to love, but it is asking me to relearn too much at once to permanently become my daily driver. For me, it’s a “stay on the soapbox and keep watching” I’m going to give it another month. Muscle memory is stubborn, and so am I.
For those who purchased it and have it in hand, what are your early impressions? Any tips, remappings, or belt-case discoveries? I’d love to hear I’m missing something obvious, especially around arrow-key navigation and that Android dictation button.