Clicks Wants $499 Today for a Keyboard Phone That Ships in December

For two years Clicks sold you a keyboard that snapped onto somebody else's phone. Now it wants to sell you the whole phone, and it wants the full $499 about three months before one lands in your hands.

The Clicks Communicator is a small Android phone with a physical keyboard under a 4.03-inch screen, the arrangement you last took seriously on a BlackBerry. Clicks locked in the final specs this week, opened order configuration, and said shipments begin in December. The $499 launch price runs through September 30. On October 1 it becomes $649.

What $499 buys

The display is a 4.03-inch AMOLED running at 120Hz behind Gorilla Glass, sitting above the keyboard instead of filling the front of the phone. Behind it is a MediaTek Dimensity 8300, a 4nm chip that plays in the upper middle of the Android field rather than at the top, paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There is also a microSD slot that reads cards up to 2TB, a line most phone makers deleted from their spec sheets years ago.

The battery is 4,350mAh and rated for more than 800 charge cycles. Clicks says it picked lithium ion over silicon carbon after third-party testing (heating, dropping, puncturing, cutting) showed silicon carbon cells failing more often, which trades away some energy density for a cell that behaves better when abused. Charging is USB-C or 15W wireless. The cameras are a 50MP main with optical stabilization and a 24MP front camera. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, three microphones, dual speakers, and a physical kill switch.

The keyboard does more than type

The keys are touch sensitive, so you can scroll a page or nudge a cursor by sliding a thumb across them instead of putting your hand over the small screen. They are backlit. The fingerprint reader lives in the spacebar. When you configure the order you pick a layout: QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Korean or Arabic, which is more physical-layout choice than almost anyone else offers.

Clicks also fits a Signal Light you can tie to specific contacts and chats, and a Prompt Key you hold for speech to text or Gemini. The company keeps describing this as a phone built to respect your time, and the hardware is at least arranged to back that up.

The software promise

The Communicator ships with Android 17, and Clicks commits to version updates through Android 20 plus five years of security patches. For a company shipping its first phone, four Android versions and five years of patches is an unusually long commitment. It is also a promise, and Clicks has to still be around to keep it.

What could go wrong

Clicks has never shipped a phone. It launched the Clicks Keyboard Case in 2024 and says it now has more than 200,000 customers across more than 100 countries, with cases for the iPhone 14 through 17, the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro, and the Motorola Razr. A case is a shell with switches in it. A phone is radios, carrier certification, thermal behavior, camera tuning, and somebody to answer the phone when any of that goes wrong.

The calendar is worth a squint too. In the company's own milestone list, December is when final certifications happen, and December is when shipments begin. That is not much slack. Meanwhile the price climbs from $499 to $649 on October 1, and preorders are paid in full, so the cheap version of this phone asks for your money well before anyone outside Clicks has used a production unit.

Then there is the rest of the bill. dbrand is making a $39 MNML case and a $34.95 Prism screen protector. Clicks sells a $49 Communicator Ring bumper, magnetic Charging Covers at $49 in polycarbonate or $79 in leather, and Clicks Care accidental damage coverage at $129 for two years with a $49 deductible in the US and Canada. Clicks Mobile is launching eSIM voice and data plans in the US and UK, with two free months for anyone who activates a Communicator.

Who it is for

CEO Adrian Li Mow Ching says nearly half of Clicks customers plan to use the Communicator as a second phone focused on communication. That tracks. A 4.03-inch screen and a hardware keyboard make a poor phone for video and a good one for answering people, and those eSIM plans exist because Clicks knows you are probably not handing it your main line.

Nobody outside the company has used a production Communicator, us included. What you are deciding by September 30 is whether $499 today beats $649 later on hardware you cannot hold first.