Share Tweet Share reddit

A few years back, the QWERTY keyboard phones were all the rage but they existed in a time period where we were slowly easing into touch screens and were soon forgotten.

In spite of this, there’s a lot of people who are still attached to the method of the physical keyboard and London-based startup Fxtec is here to deliver on the nostalgia of the physical mobile keyboard.

The phone has a slider mechanism that’s familiar to those of us who grew up with these types of phones, albeit, perhaps now it’s a bit smoother than the slider mechanisms we remembered. The slider tilts the 5.99 inch display at a 155 degree angle and on the phone we’ll find a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The star of the show, the keyboard, features five rows of 64 backlit keys and runs on Android 9, with a 3,200mAh battery and a Snapdragon 835 chipset. Yes, it’s a rather outdated one (2017), but we all know it’s pretty reliable.

Optics-wise the phone has a 12MP + 5MP dual camera setup on the back and an 8MP front camera.

The Pro1 has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage that can be expanded through microSD and the phone supports a good number of global brands so it should work on any carrier you have available in your home country or when you travel abroad.

The phone comes with a price tag of $649, which is a bit pricey, considering the outdated processor but if you got an itch for physical keyboards, the Pro1 is here to scratch it.