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When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, physical keyboards quickly lost ground to touchscreens and faded from mainstream smartphones.
Now, a new wave of startups, including U.K.-based Clicks Technology and Chinese firm Unihertz, is bringing them back and carving out a niche for phones with tactile buttons.
The shift away from buttons once seemed final. Blackberry, long known for its keyboard phones, stopped producing hardware in 2016 and shuttered its software services in 2022.
