Tech

This Tiny Smartphone Packs a Pocket-Friendly Physical Keyboard

There are plenty of phones that look toward the future at MWC 2026, but only a few take inspiration from the past.. The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is a pocket-sized handset with a physical keyboard that brings back BlackBerry nostalgia and introduces a ton of new tricks to boot. It’s the latest in a series of phones from Unihertz, following its BlackBerry Passport-like Titan series.. Though the shift to glass touchscreens heralded by the original iPhone has enabled far greater visibility and functionality in mobile experience, a subset of tech fans longs for the bygone days of physical keyboards and buttons, iconicized by BlackBerry’s classic devices.. Modern accessory company Clicks filled that retro niche with physical keyboard cases, even debuting its own version of a BlackBerry. It’s launching the Clicks Communicator, which the Titan 2 Elite could be competing against when both arrive in the market.. Much like the Communicator, the Titan 2 Elite intends to be a full-fledged smartphone with half the screen of a typical handset to make way for the keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite doesn’t have pricing or release details yet, but it will launch on Kickstarter next month.. In hand, the Titan 2 Elite is a delightful throwback. Yet even a cursory use of its 4.03-inch (1,080×1,200-pixel resolution) AMOLED touchscreen with a 120Hz refresh rate shows how modern it is, with smooth browsing and a home screen full of apps. It is a bit thicker than today’s phones (especially the Samsung Galaxy Edge and iPhone Air), but that only helps it rest better between my palms.. The big feature is the keyboard, which has a full QWERTY layout and reminds me of the old BlackBerry Curve.. However, whereas that older phone used a rolling ball to control its cursor, the Titan 2 Elite has a brilliant solution — all its physical keys use capacitive sensing. I literally ran my thumb up and down the keyboard, watching the screen roll up and down as if I’d done the same motion on its touchscreen. It’s a gesture borrowed from some of the final BlackBerry phones in the 2010s, and is featured on some of Unihertz’s prior Titan phones.. The touch keys are a pleasure to use, and the functionality cleverly sidesteps one of the bigger pitfalls of going with a physical keyboard, i.e., less room for a display. If my thumbs aren’t blocking the screen because they’re scrolling on the keys, it doesn’t matter as much that it’s half the size of the display on most modern phones.. There’s another scrolling trick with the capacitive keyboard, too. You can set it so the left side moves the cursor while the right still scrolls up and down, and then simply tap anywhere on the right to “click” the cursor, enabling mouse-like navigation. Who needs a BlackBerry-style scrolling wheel?. The Titan 2 Elite has two 50-megapixel rear cameras and a 32-megapixel front-facing camera. David Lumb/CNET. Admittedly, this feature was a little rough in execution. I was told that the Titan 2 Elite models shown off at MWC a

Tech

Rabbit’s Cyberdeck is a modern take on a netbook

When you think of an AI-forward PC, you might think of something like NVIDIA’s $3,999 DGX Spark — a computer with enough computing power to run complex large language models locally. That’s not what Rabbit is trying to build with Project Cyberdeck. Instead, the company’s goal is to produce a device tailored for vibe coding, and Engadget was given an exclusive first look at the upcoming PC. Rabbit began working on Project Cyberdeck after the company’s CEO, Jesse Lyu, saw how much his software engineers were using Claude Code. Lyu thought a small form factor PC, like the netbooks that were popular in the late aughts, with a command line interface would be ideal for on-the-go vibe coding, but when he went online to look for something that fit the bill, he was disappointed.”They all come with shitty rubber dome keyboards,” Lyu says of low-cost PCs like the latest Chromebooks, which use flexible silicone sheets under their keys to save on space and cost. “They’re not something you would enjoy typing on for an extended period of time.” So Rabbit decided to build its own device. For inspiration, Lyu and company looked to an unlikely source: the Sony Vaio P. The Cyberdeck takes inspiration from the Sony Vaio P. SonySony’s netbook was only briefly available from the start of 2009 to about the end of 2010. At the time, the 8-inch Vaio P was the world’s lightest netbook, weighing just 1.4 pounds, but it had a host of issues. It was also expensive, costing considerably more than other Intel Atom notebooks of the time. In 2009, the most affordable Vaio P would set you back $900 (about $1,365 adjusted for inflation). With Project Cyberdeck, Rabbit is aiming for a device that costs about $500, and hopefully avoids a similar fate.I saw a few early renders of Project Cyberdeck, which Rabbit isn’t ready to share publicly yet. Imagine a cross between the Rabbit R1, Vaio P and the original Nintendo DS. It looks cute. All the renders had four USB-C ports to allow users to connect the device to external monitors and peripherals, though the actual IO specs are as-yet undecided. The company is in the process of sourcing components and working towards a final design, so details can — and will — change. I saw some of the parts Lyu has been testing in his office, but no final prototype as such. For one, Rabbit still needs to decide on a chipset. The company is aiming for a performance benchmark relative to the Raspberry Pi 5, which has a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor clocked at 2.4GHz. With 16GB of RAM, the Raspberry Pi 5 can run two external monitors, a capability Rabbit hopes to match with the Cyberdeck. The idea here is to make a device that’s powerful enough it won’t feel slow when it’s communicating with Anthropic and OpenAI’s servers, but affordable enough to make it a no-brainer purchase for developers. The company confirmed Project Cyberdeck will run Linux. Rabbit will allow users to modify the operating system and install any third

Tech

Yeti’s Durable New Portable Power Station Doubles as an Off-Grid Solar Generator and UPS

Goal Zero’s newest portable power station comes with a more durable build and additional capabilities.

Tech

My Favorite Gaming Headphones From SteelSeries Cured My Battery Anxiety

I’ve used a lot of great wireless gaming headsets, but this pair from SteelSeries helped me stop worrying about battery life, making them worth the high price.