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The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is a brand new phone that looks like a blast from the past. With a design inspired by classic BlackBerry smartphones, the Titan 2 Elite features a 4.03 inch square display positioned above a thumb keyboard.
But it has a thoroughly modern spec sheet, including a 120 Hz AMOLED touchscreen display, a MediaTek Dimensity processor, 12GB of LPDDR5 memory, and Android 16 software. After showing off the phone during MWC earlier this month, the Unihertz is now taking pre-orders for the Titan 2 Elite through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Reward levels start at $389 and the phone is expected to begin shipping to backers in June.
While I’d normally point out that backing a crowdfunding campaign isn’t quite the same thing as pre-ordering a product, Unihertz is an established brand that’s successfully brought a number of products to market, including other BlackBerry clones and other phones. So there’s a pretty good chance this thing will actually ship this summer.
It also helps that the Kickstarter campaign seems to be going very well. Unihertz met its $100 thousand goal within 11 minutes of launching the campaign, and by the time I got around to writing this article later in the same day, backers had pledged more than $2 million.
Last year Unihertz launched a similar phone called the Titan 2, but the new model is smaller, faster, and ships with a newer version of Android (which matters on these phones, because Unihertz doesn’t have the best track record for delivering OS updates, although the company does say it plans to offer 5 years of OS updates and security patches through 2031).
image via: @Unihertz
The new phone does have a smaller battery than the Titan 2, and it loses one of that phone’s most unique features (a small two inch screen on the back of the phone). But it adds an OLED screen and a programmable button on one side of the phone that you can use to launch the camera app, flashlight, your preferred digital assistant, or any other app.
The new model is also available in two color options: black or orange.
A key feature of the Titan 2 Elite is… the keyboard. It’s a backlit keyboard with physical keys that provide tactile feedback as you type. It’s also touch-sensitive, allowing you to slide your finger across the surface to scroll or move a cursor. And there’s support for keyboard shortcuts, and with support for configuring different actions for long or short presses, you can configure a lot of shortcut actions.
120 Hz
AMOLED
4.5 inches
1440 x 1440 pixels
120 Hz
IPS LCD
Rear display
410 x 502 pixels
50MP telephoto (auto-focus)
32MP front
50MP telephoto (auto-focus)
32MP front
8MP telephoto (3.4X)
32MP front
Bluetooth 6.0
NFC
5G (dual-SIM)
Bluetooth 5.4
NFC
5G (dual-SIM)
Dual nano-SIM or SIM + microSD card
Dual nano-SIM
G-sensor
Compass
Gyroscope
Proximity
Ambient Light
FM Radio
5.42″ x 3.49″ x 0.42″
8.29 ounces
$579 (retail
$489 (retail)
$490 (retail)
Unsurprisingly, Unihertz blames the higher price tag for its new phone on the increased costs of RAM and storage, although it’s likely that the AMOLED screen also newer processors also played at least some role.