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One day in December 2025, my AGM G2 Guardian rugged smartphone suddenly shut down. No warning. Nothing. It had not fallen down, been used in a fight, or been struck by lightning or by a truck. It was sitting on a desk. I picked it up to use it and found it switched off. And it never came back on after that, no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, I put it away in my phone archives.
Yesterday, I thought to have a look at it again and found that the back had cracked open and battery fluid seeped out. Apparently, the battery had burst open.
The phone was in very good physical shape at the time it died and also at the time I stored it away. In the photo above and the video below, it looks terrible because of the fluid from the swollen/broken battery seeping out through the cracked back cover.
This is a rugged smartphone that spent most of its 3-year lifespan on a side desk at home. It has not seen any rugged action since its arrival, yet it is dead. By way of comparison, I have non-rugged smartphones that lived much longer than that.
As you can imagine, this is rather disappointing. I liked the AGM G2 Guardian and I was looking forward to many years of usage. With the burst battery and leaking battery fluid (which is toxic), I can’t even keep it in my archives for reference. It has to be discarded.
It is a smartphone with a handful of advanced features that set it apart from the average rugged smartphone. As such, I was quite fond of it.
You can read my written review published in 2023, or watch my video review (or do both).
Author:Mister Mobility
Digital Skills and Communication Coach | Mobile Phone Connoisseur since 2001 | Tech Blogging since 2004
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It is a new year and another attempt at building a new smartphone on BlackBerry nostalgia is here. Called Clicks Communicator , this modern Android smartphone features a hardware QWERTY keyboard in true BlackBerry style.
The team behind this product is the same team that produces Clicks keyboard that has been in the market for a while. And the company says they have sold over 100,000 Clicks keyboards in over 100 countries. So perhaps that factor means they have a good chance at hitting this right; right?
Product image of Clicks Communicator, a BlackBerry-style Android smartphone
I don’t think so. That era is dead. The number of people who want a QWERTY keyboard smartphone are so small that it is a pipe dream. And why is it so now, after all, once upon a time, QWERTY keyboard phones were desired by millions of mobile users worldwide.
A little bit of history is required here. Back in the days of alphanumeric T9 keypads on mobile phones, a QWERTY keyboard was the best form of text input available in the mobile world.
There existed touchscreen phones at the time, but they were of the resistive category. This meant that you could not use your fingers to interact with those screens. Instead, they worked only with a stylus. And a stylus was inconvenient in a number of ways. For one, you had to pull it out to use it. And you had to put it away when you were done.
Years down the road, Apple released the iPhone with a different type of touscreen – a capacitive one. And capacitive touscreen technology allowed anyone to interact with the phone using their fingers. Very natural. Very demure. Very convenient.
And that was the beginning of the end of the reign of physical QWERTY keyboards and the death of Blackberry too.
BlackBerry phones have been extinct for years now, but every other day, there is someone teasing the return to those days. But that’s wishful thinking. Touchscreen text input has superseded hardest QWERTY. It is much more versatile now and much more convenient to use.
Only a handful of people really want or need a phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard. Every such phone produced in the last 10 years has recorded poor sales. None has made a splash. The world has largely moved on.
100,000 clicks keyboards in sales is solid going. But that will not translate to 100,000 sales of the Clicks Communicator. I wager that it won’t sell even half of the keyboards numbers. And that is extremely niche for smartphone sales.
QWERTY may not be dead, but it is wanted by only such a small subset of mobile users globally that, to all intents and purposes, it is insignificant. And this is why Clicks Communicator will not make a splash either. It will sell among a small niche of lovers. That’s all.
There is a reason why no big phone brands bother anymore with hardware QWERTY keyboards. That reason is that only a small set of people pine for BlackBerry nostalgia. The rest of us have moved on.
That said, if you are one of the few longing for a return to BlackBerry days and would love to explore it, here are the Clicks Communicator’s specifications:
- Display : 4.03-inch, 1080 x 1200 pixels, OLED screen.
- Operating System : Android 16 (yes, it will run your Android apps).
- Processor : Unspecified chipset.
- RAM : Unspecified
- Storage : 256 GB internal storage, expandable via microSD up to 2TB.
- Rear Camera : 50 MP
- Front Camera : 24 MP
- Battery : 4,000 mAh silicon-carbon
- Wired Charging : USB-C
- Wireless Charging : Qi2
- Cellular Connectivity : 5G, 4G LTE, 3G/2G
- SIM Cards : NanoSIM + eSIM
- Local Connectivity : Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
- Miscellaneous : 3.5mm
- Dimensions : 130.5 × 78.63 × 12mm
- Weight : 170g
I like how lightweight it is and as a veteran lover of hardware QWERTY phones myself, I might purchase one just for the love of the idea. I doubt that I will be putting it to serious use or that it will replace my daily driver. I do wonder why the chipset and RAM have not been published; those are critical information that can make or break a decision on my part.
The Clicks Communicator has a price tag of $499, but if you reserve one now, you get to pay only $399. You can hop over to the Clicks website to reserve yours.
Author:Mister Mobility
Digital Skills and Communication Coach | Mobile Phone Connoisseur since 2001 | Tech Blogging since 2004
