A physical keyboard for iPhone is the biggest “why not?” gadget of 2024

Do you ever feel like the iPhone would be better if it had a physical keyboard? Yeah, no, neither do we, but that didn't stop a well-known YouTuber and the biggest Blackberry aficionado in the world from getting together to create Clicks, a case that adds a keyboard at the bottom of your Apple smartphone. 
"Yes, of course, it's nostalgia," said Michael Fisher, also known as the tech YouTuber MrMobile, when we met at a CES in Las Vegas. "But it's just cool nonetheless. And let's be honest, we do all miss the feeling of writing on a physical keyboard!". Fisher's accomplice in creating Clicks is Kevin Michalak, better known on the internet as "Crackberry Kevin."
"I get emails every single day for the last ten years from people asking me, 'When are keys coming back to phones?' - that having that would mean not having an iPhone, which we all want". "If you think about it, putting a keyboard on an iPad as an accessory isn't weird. So why not on an iPhone? It makes more sense to have a keyboard on the phone as an accessory rather than have a phone with an integrated keyboard all the time!"
Unlike an external keyboard, Clicks doesn't pair to the iPhone via Bluetooth. Rather, it has a USB-C or Lightning prong that connects to the port when the phone slides into the case. Unlike previous attempts at the concept of an iPhone keyboard, Clicks protrudes unapologetically at the bottom of the device, turning smartphones that are already big into massive devices. As strange as it sounds, this unusual design feature makes Clicks stand out. As in, literally stand out: the iPhone + Clicks combo wouldn't fit in any normal-sized jeans pocket.

According to Michalak, the trade-off is worth it. Writing on the Clicks is faster than the virtual keyboard, and above all, the physical keyboard frees up a lot of display real estate that would otherwise be covered by the virtual keyboard. 
"If you're a creator and you're writing a caption for a picture or a story, you end up losing about half of the screen to the keyboard," says Michalak. Having a physical keyboard attached to the iPhone comes with additional perks, including a very long list of keyboard shortcuts. Apple implemented them in iOS for users to access them on any Bluetooth or cabled external keyboard, but they can't be accessed via the virtual one. 
The space bar, for example, can be used to scroll down a web page without touching the screen, while the combination of cmd + spacebar opens up Spotlight for Search, just like it would on a Mac.

At CES 2024, we could do a quick hands-on with Clicks. The device is interesting, sitting at the intersection between virtual and physical, and has the potential to talk to target groups spanning from Gen-Xers with a never-quenched Blackberry nostalgia to Gen-Zers and Millennials who strive to find a physical answer to their virtual anxieties. It also helps that the case is well designed and engineered, while the marketing narrative doesn't fully skirt away from the inherent absurdity of the entire project. And if Blackberry fans still weren't convinced, here's the final detail: the Clicks team included Joseph Hofer, the industrial designer who worked on the Blackberry Bold keyboard.