Meet your new phone away from phone

The Unihertz booth at MWC was a bit out of the way, but those who found it seemed to want to get the Titan Elite 2. Of course, the cosmic orange color caught the eye, and the QWERTY keyboard reminded one viewer of their old BlackBerry. But once I understood it, I understood why it was so popular. It’s thin, light and compact, and the physical keys just beg to be pressed. I didn’t feel embarrassed, which I can’t say about the phone I’m currently using. I didn’t want to put it down and, judging by the steady stream of visitors I saw at the stand, I wasn’t alone.

As usual, MWC came up with a bunch of weird and delicious ideas about phones that aren’t just sheets of glass and aluminum. This year I saw a phone with an electric igniter (it also didn’t work when I tried to see it in action), a phone with a gimbal camera resembling DJI Osmo, and even pet phones. Will any of these ideas prove to be a winner in the long run? Probably not, but it’s nice to imagine something different.

Between weird phones, another trend popped up at places like the Unihertz booth: phones that aren’t your main phone. It’s not a brand new idea, but the concept of a streamlined device that offers a better typing experience or gives you a little rest from the constant nagging of your regular phone, seems to be gaining momentum.

In almost all cases, these are phones that could be your primary phone, and Unihertz in particular has many fans using the company’s existing devices this way. The Titan Elite 2 runs Android 16, and Unihertz promises OS upgrades up to Android 20. Watching vertical videos on the square 4-inch screen won’t be the best experience, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. But the Elite 2 might be more appealing as a device when you don’t plan to watch a lot of TikTok videos — perhaps even if you want to actively discourage yourself from doing so, even.

There are some overlapping intentions behind the secondary phone concept, but they have one common principle: creating space between you and your primary phone. If you want to spend less time on the weekend scrolling and more time reading a book, you can put away your regular phone and use a secondary phone for texting and calling, while keeping it away from social media apps. Better yet, it’s okay for secondary phones to be a little crappy. If scrolling through TikTok on your secondary phone is a terrible experience, you might be less tempted to do it.

The Titan Elite 2 will likely remind fans of QWERTY phones of the Clicks Communicator, which debuted earlier this year at CES. The concept is almost identical, although the two devices offer different typing experiences: the Unihertz keys are square and located side by side, side by side, and the Clicks keys are separate and oval shaped. Clicks explicitly advertises the Communicator’s potential as a second device, better optimized for typing emails and messages rather than scrolling through social media. Like the Elite 2, it’s a full Android phone (with a headphone jack and microSD slot!), so it could be your daily driver.

The Light Phone III is a very different device from the Communicator and Titan 2 Elite. Texting, calling, and a few connected functions like calendar and navigation are basically all it can do. At the show, I spoke to Light co-founder and CEO Kaiwei Tang, who has focused on creating minimalist phones for the past decade. He says 50% of Light’s customer base uses the phone as their primary device, while the other half sees it as a complement to their full smartphone. Tang also sees demand increasing. “For the last 10 years, we have grown every year, even though we have no marketing budget,” he says.

But there’s a huge elephant in this room: Is the answer to the question “I want a break from my phone” really… another phone? Is there a day when that item will be a pair of glasses, a smart watch, or headphones that you control with your voice? Tang sees the appeal of a screenless device, but doesn’t think it’s realistic in the short term. “I love the voice user interface,” he says. “I think this could be the future, but we’re just not there yet.” We still need discreet contribution methods, he says. A small screen that you carry around seems to be the method we’ve all landed on.

Another approach is to integrate the minimalist phone with your main phone. This has obvious disadvantages; If it’s a focus mode or an app, there’s almost certainly an easy way to quickly turn it off and get back to your social media scrolling habits. Fairphone’s latest device has an interesting take on the idea: a physical switch on the side of the phone that triggers a customizable “moment” with access only to the apps you specify – and only to certain people who can interrupt you. The physical slider adds just a bit more friction than toggling a focus mode on and off in quick settings.

This growing interest in minimal phones comes at an unfortunate time, however. You will have heard about the RAM crisis and its harmful consequences for phone manufacturers. It’s almost inevitable that phone prices will rise, and when A The phone costs more, so you’d probably think long and hard before buying two. The situation is undoubtedly making it more difficult for smaller brands trying to break into the market with something new, and the situation doesn’t appear to be improving any time soon.

Still, the people at the companies I spoke with this week didn’t seem discouraged. For Tang, it’s his customers who keep him going. “I am hopeful because my clients are mostly young,” he says. “My generation, we are ruined,” he adds with a laugh. “The next generation, I feel like they have a better sense of management or making decisions that change the tools they use.” If he can demonstrate some optimism given the challenges his company faces, then I think it’s fair to continue to hope that more good things are coming, whatever strange form they might take.