The Clicks Communicator Design & Thoughts On What Comes Next

This is the Andres Segovia Show. Hey everyone, it's Andres and I'm coming at you with another video. One that I think a lot of us have been on the edge waiting for because while a lot of us would love to see BlackBerry come back, there's really no hope of BlackBerry Limited themselves coming back. If anything, BlackBerry Limited, and I agree with CrackBerry Kevin on this, they should rebrand themselves again. This time as QNX because that's really what they've been pushing. Let BlackBerry the name go to someone else because they're building what looks to be the spiritual successor to BlackBerry because it's being done by BlackBerry engineers and BlackBerry aficionados. They put out this video recently and of course many have been tuning in. I haven't checked it out yet. I wanted to check it out with you from the design stage. It looks like we're getting some kind of hands-on with this device, a little bit of a history. I like to see it so let's roll with this. Creating something that was our own distinct icon was one of our priorities. We wanted something that could stand the test of time for this new modern way of communicating. In some ways, an icon is a symbol that speaks to an identity. If we would have brought BlackBerry forward and done something that had a resemblance to it, we would have been trying to adopt an identity that Qlix doesn't necessarily have. That's a good point. The idea for Qlix actually kicked off Atabar, which all great businesses, I think, start at a bar. I was catching up with Kevin and he was walking me through all these projects that he was working on. We were kind of coming to the end and he goes, I've got one more thing. The initial idea was to build a keyboard case for an iPhone. He showed me some early graphics or renders and I was like taken back. I wanted to be part of it. We launched the Qlix keyboard case to the world and it really helped validate the market. And as we kept validating it, we made our proof points to get to the Qlix communicator. We've been talking about doing a Qlix phone ever since we started building a keyboard case. And we always came back to this isn't the right thing to do right now. But then the stars started to align. After 10 years at BlackBerry, I never wanted to really design another smartphone. It became about consumption and distraction and all of that. I started pulling away. I saw them as tools. I saw them as means to communicate. So when these guys, you know, called me up from New York, it made me step back. And I realized what they were attempting to create was something that broke the norm. I could see this product, you know, being a way to help shape something special in the world that we're living in today. Yeah. That first conversation really centered around how do people communicate, take action and become productive on the go today? And so it wasn't just about buttons. It wasn't just about typing. It was about input. It was about confidence. It was about control. Those are some of the words that came up over and over again. Many people on the planet today haven't experienced a phone in their hands that feels this good. The width of it, the length of it, the balance point of it, where my thumbs go as I pick it up. It's completely natural. I want to reach for the prompt key and use voice. It's exactly where you want it to be. Not too low where you're accidentally pushing the button. Just that little bit of reach just needed for the intent to be there. Yeah. It's perfection. When it comes to making a great keyboard, there's a number of things to consider. The biggest thing is key separation. And that's where the raised detailing of our keys allow for that. The other is the size of the key. What we ended up with was splitting the circular key horizontally and then pulling it vertically. That created this pill shape that is perfect for the product in many ways. The click of the key, the snap of the key when you're pressing down, how quickly you feel the confirmation that it's entered that character before you're jumping on to the next. When you're getting up to 60, 70, 90, 100 words a minute, it's a feeling at that point. Because we're swiping and typing, I wanted to make sure that you could move back and forth very naturally. So we've done something a little different with the communicator in terms of raising the screen. Was one of the first kind of design details that I added and carried that even through to the chin, bringing a slight raise to the bottom of the product, which ended up being really beautiful. Because when you're holding it, you're trying to create a feeling of security, of balance. These are slight things that makes the product wonderful to hold in your hand. One of the features on old BlackBerrys that people loved and I loved was the blinking red light. Notification light. Then it was mainly email or text messages or BBMs you were getting. Yeah. It wasn't every notification for every app on your phone like it is today. So you sort of ignore them. And for us, we said, if you're going to have a purpose-built communication tool, when that light goes off, it should only be for things that are really important to you. I actually took inspiration from marine lights where you see down a corridor, you have this thing exposed. It kind of sits out off the wall and you're able to see it from all angles. And that kind of gave me this idea of, well, what if we did that here such that you're actually able to see it from five out of the six views? If it is face down, if something important came in from your partner or whatever, you could still get that little bit of indication. That's one of the things I'm maybe most proud of us as Team Clix. Taking the best elements of BlackBerry and reinterpreting them for modern times. You know, I have a relationship with millions of people who would want nothing more than to bring back BlackBerry. BlackBerry was the right tool for the time, but the way people use phones has changed. Yeah. Even if you're going to build something that's purpose-built for communication, the way we communicate is different. It's multimedia rich. So you need a slightly bigger screen. It requires you to not just type, but also talk. And so we needed something like the prompt key. We have built a really great DNA in the last two, three years around keys, the high contrast, color, personality, more of the sneaker culture than business suits. If you think about BlackBerry, it was always black and chrome. That's not the world of 2026. 2026 is athletic leisure. It's pickleball after work. So if we're going to build a product that feels modernized, black and chrome would be out. We couldn't just lift and shift the BlackBerry form factor. No, we want to, because we want to build something that's distinctly different and optimal for today's communication tasks. At every crossroads in this project, we asked ourselves, is this in support of helping people to communicate with confidence, take action, be efficient, save seconds, minutes, hours every time you pick it up and let those answers guide what made it into the product. And frankly, what didn't and being capable of saying, no, that's not communicator. We're actually creating something that has a legacy and its own point of view on design. It's amazing to be at this point where we're able to actually deliver on a vision without compromise. I think we're all realizing we're a little bit too addicted to our screens. We need to get back to prioritizing the real world and people again. And I think to be in a position where we can build cool stuff sets us up for a really interesting decade ahead. There's no team on the planet who is as passionate about building a product like this as Klix is. We're sweating every detail. Everything matters because we want this to be absolutely perfect. Absolutely. Especially when you have the reputations of not just Crackberry Kevin, but Mr. Mobile himself, Michael Fisher behind this stuff. So when Klix first launched their keyboard, I was one of the founding members. And when they announced the communicator, which I expected them to eventually, because I'm like, you're laying on the groundwork here. I know where you eventually have to go with this, because you can't just keep building a keyboard for one experience. Because at the time when the phone launched, I mean, with the product launched, it was for iPhones. And they said it was exclusively going to be for iPhones. And when they did that, they said, yeah, but the thing is, anybody that's owned iPhones for their entire lives never had the BlackBerry experience. It would be like, well, maybe. But they were trying to capture, so to speak, those BlackBerry users that decided to go with iPhone over an Android to make up for the fact that they couldn't use a BlackBerry anymore. And there's some that really wanted that tactility. But then to add something that was very big, that would throw the phone off balance, so to speak, it's a great attachment, a great intent. And I have it. I don't use it as much as I would like, but there are some times where I'm pounding out a lot of different, a lot of text into what I'm doing. I use my phone as a communicator, my phone as a communicator. So yes, that was logically a good tool to have. But I always wanted that for Android because my business stuff, I usually run it through Android. And that's why I usually, when I carry, because I've been carrying two phones at a time since maybe 2009, 2010. So it's been a long time for me. And it was a habit I try to break because I wanted one phone to be all and all. But in the nature of the business that I'm in, I'm not just one business, multiple businesses. And as a content creator, I needed multiple tools. So there was the communicator, which was a BlackBerry. And my Android for everything else. But then eventually when BlackBerry went the way of the dinosaur, I ended up picking up an iPhone. I would have picked up two Androids. It would have been easier that way. But my service industry for real estate was very much biased towards iPhone after BlackBerry. So the services that I needed were on an iPhone. So I begrudgingly got an iPhone, which was the XR. And that was my kind of the entryway into that because the previous iPhone that I had, I think was the iPhone 5. I lasted about 24 hours with it before. And I screw this, I'm returning it. I'm picking something else. So the XR was the one that I held for more than 24 hours. And that was kind of like my gateway drug, so to speak, into iPhone because the services that I started adopting were all tailor-made for iOS. Since then, some of them have gone cross platforms. But the point is, I was always missing the tactility, that confidence that came with typing away on a physical keyboard. So I tried to repurpose all my old BlackBerrys. They're running BlackBerry 10 OS. And then when the servers got turned off, it sucks. So I couldn't use some of them anymore. But at least my fallback was the Amazon App Store. But then the Amazon App Store was shut down for everything else Android. It's only for Fire tablets and such. So now there's not even that as a fallback. So it really is a paperweight, especially in the United States, when they're turning off certain services for cell phone carriers technology. So now you can't even use the older devices unless you're in international places or other places that still have that technology. So it's like, dude, these things are just paperweights. So every now and then, I'll just pick them up just like a clock away to see if I still have my muscle memory. So now with this coming up, this was a no-brainer to me. As soon as it was announced, man, I take my money. I'm going to be one of the founding members for that too. I believe in it. But I also believe, I think I wasn't entirely believing it was more of a crowdfunding thing. But in my mind, I had to treat it as such because it is now May 18th as I record this. And we still haven't seen a working model. We got the design, the look of it. I like the insights. It's great. It's kind of building up the hype and such. But there are those of us that are still wanting to see, I want to see it work. So big questions that really stand out to me that need to be addressed are, is this going to be a Google device? Which it's going to be. It has to be. This is your first product that you're launching. You're not going to launch it in a de-Googled space, especially right now with all the controversies going on with Android or Google pretty much locking down Android. So you're going to want to go Google Play services or Google mobile services to make sure you have the good experience right out of the box. Niagara Falls and all that stuff. Really neat. Nice. But we haven't been told what that operating system pretty much is. Is this their own proprietary operating system or have they partnered up with another OS company to do it? Because I think that's where they're running into this delayed, at least to me, to show you how it works. Everything has just been designed. We know it. We love it. Thank you. We want to see the screen on. We don't want to see simulated screens. We know what Niagara Falls looks like. You can download Niagara Falls right now onto your Android device and use it. We want to see how it operates on a Klix keyboard or a Klix communicator in this case. And I have other questions because of who Kevin Mikula, Crackberry Kevin is. He's also an investor. And I don't know if he's a stakeholder into another company called Apostrophe. For those of you that see me cover this, go check out my Klix communicator in-depth video because I can tell you that I'm really curious to see if they're going to bring that operating system as an option to us users who want to go to a more private, secure, and de-Googled experience with this. Because I hope that's an option. Some of us want to know we can unlock the bootloader to be able to do that. And if we can go de-Google, then you start really picking up the spirit of what owning a BlackBerry was. You were trading convenience for privacy and security. When BlackBerry launched their first Android device, it was the Priv. It was short for privacy and short for privilege. Same thing here. So that's what I'm curious about. That's the DNA of BlackBerry. That's what they were highlighting, but trying to make their own thing and trying to make inroads to be with the hip crowd and such, with the modern audience. That's the only thing I had to consider about what Jeff said. For anybody in Hollywood, you would know that when anybody says, we need to update it for a modern audience, you already know that movie's going to suck. Christopher Nolan, what are you doing with the Odyssey? Seriously, what the hell? But anyway, I am curious. Those are the two main questions I have about all this. We haven't received the answers, and I'm sure they're probably going to reveal more when we start getting the hands-on videos, when they start going over the OS. And I'm assuming it is a Google product, a Google operating system that they will introduce. But I am curious if we'll have the options for that, or if that can be an option down the road somewhere, because that would still be pretty cool. It gives you more control over your product. But anyway, that's it for this one. What do you guys think? Did you pre-order this? Are you still waiting to see this thing work before you actually try to order one of these things for yourself? Because I'm really curious. I don't even remember what color I bought, or if I had an option to pick the color, because it's been a while. But I got to tell you, I wish I could own all of them, or I could just swap all the colors that I want, just because it looks really, really cool. And I did that with my BlackBerry Porsche 9983, where I had a bunch of different covers for the back. It was a red one, a carbon fiber one. I think I had another leather one. Changing the identity is pretty cool. I like that they kept that DNA here too. And the blinking light on the button, everything they said, I'm with them. That's what I'm with them with, because it just speaks to those of us that have been longing for a device like this that wasn't just a play thing. These are tools that help us get our job done. But they also admittedly say that it's more of a companion to your main phone. So I am curious to see what that experience would be like. And that's it for this episode of The Andres Segovia Show. Remember to like, share, and subscribe, and stay in the know where everybody is that you're watching. And follow me across the socials at TheAndresSegovia on xTwitter, underscore AndresSegovia. I'll see you in the next one.