Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Unihertz Titan Slim Review: At Least It’s Cheap”.
If you build it, they will type that’s the bet made by any company that builds a physical keyboard into a phone in 2022. The options are so scarce and the true believers so devoted that many of them will buy it. No matter what i say, but what my theory presupposes is this time. Maybe you shouldn’t i’m michael fisher, and this is the latest weird phone from unihertz. It’S called the titan slim.
That strange name makes a little more sense. If you stick this phone alongside some earlier devices from unihertz, both the titan and titan pocket were rubber-wrapped bricks. True monsters that seemed targeted just as much at construction workers as keyboard enthusiasts, but with the titan slim unihertz shrank the height and width to something approximating a modern smartphone, even if it forgot to cut down on the thickness. And yet even with all this z depth. To work with unihertz told me, it didn’t have room for one thing: a headphone jack personally, that doesn’t matter to me at all, and thankfully the phone’s bluetooth performance is excellent. But it’s a strange omission when you consider that the target market for this thing is people shopping for a technological anachronism.
Maybe that’s why unihertz did find room for an infrared port, or maybe it just had a lot of those components to get rid of. I might have gotten off on a better foot with the titan slim if it was a wholly new design or an improvement on the product, it’s emulating, but while it may look like tcl’s old blackberry key2 that similarity vanishes the moment, you pick it up because it Feels cheap, where the blackberry leveraged, rubberized and matte materials to feel more premium than it actually was. The titan slim is undeniably unforgivably plastic, the kind of plastic that bonds to your skin oils. The minute you pick it up and holds onto them long after you’ve put it down. Maybe that’s why one of the rewards, if the titan slim hits its stretch, goal on kickstarter will be this rubber case, and what makes this a particularly confusing letdown is that unihertz knows how to make phones that feel robust and rugged phones, you’d actually want to hold. So i can only assume this was a cost cutting measure that sense of cheap compromise pervades the titan slim.
The 4.2 inch display has an aspect ratio that not every app can readily adapt to. It has poor viewing angles and it doesn’t get bright enough to read easily in the sun. The haptic motor is awful. It feels like it was repurposed from a cheap, motel’s magic fingers, vibrating bed, there’s no 5g in part due to the three-year-old mid-tier processor.
That also makes android 11 drag just a little more than i’m willing to accept and then there’s the camera. I don’t even need to talk about the camera. I just need to bump the backing track, a little roll out, a few samples to confirm what you already suspect and then we can move on. Am i being a snob? Am i out of touch because all i seem to do these days is cover two thousand dollar folding phones.
Well, maybe, no because i’ll tell you why i would forgive most of those compromises if the typing experience made up for it and it doesn’t. I expected the keyboard to be the best part of this thing, because the keycaps themselves are so similar to the blackberry, key2 and unihertz did get the switch action right. There’S a fair amount of travel and the mechanical feedback is delightfully tactile. Also welcome are the keyboard shortcuts from my home screen. I can short press t to launch telegram or long press it to take me to twitter and if you swipe on the keyboard’s capacitive surface, it works as a trackpad. But all those features came from blackberry and the changes unihertz had to make when copying this particular bit of homework are universally bad.
I’Ve talked before about how the company puts its modifier keys in the wrong place, but you can get used to that. You can even get used to the nested space bar interrupting the bottom row. What’S tougher to get used to is the cramped layout and the lack of balance when you type? This is a little tough to explain if you haven’t used a key2, but that phone might have looked awkward to type on, but its weight distribution was designed such that it was actually pretty comfortable, while the titan slim is just as top heavy as it looks, and The awkward fumbling that results is amplified by the fact that unihertz stuck its fingerprint sensor right in the middle of the utility belt, a fingerprint sensor that doubles as a touch sensitive home key. You can see where this is going. You graze it when you’re typing, which takes you back home unless you toggle the double tap override. That was presumably included to address this very problem.
Unfortunately, the ergonomic sin of that placement isn’t something software can solve. The touch scrolling can be erratic, even when it’s not outright freaking out like this example, which i’ll attribute to my pre-production unit, the back lighting is dingy and uneven and android still isn’t built for a physical keyboard. So one of my biggest annoyances from all the way back in 2015 is still here, even though you can start typing right on the home screen to search android will screw it up every single time. Okay, that last one isn’t unihertz’s fault but add all the downsides together and the result is a keyboard so fiddly and fussy that most of the time i just wanted to give up and put it down, which you know might be a valid reason to buy.
This thing, if what you want most is a phone to save you from your phone, but unihertz already makes a better product for that purpose. A phone called the jelly 2 which, despite its truly miniscule size, still somehow made room for a headphone jack he’s already dead. Now i want to be clear: i’m not coming down on this thing, because it’s unconventional unconventional is my favorite thing to cover it’s. Why i make videos on like the motorola, razer and samsung dex instead of making my seventh video on the iphone se, but – and i think i’ve said this before it’s not enough to be weird – you also have to be good now, if you’ve resolved to buy the Titan slam anyway well good news. There are some upsides we can end on.
As you heard, the speakerphone is serviceably loud. There are dual sim slots. If you want to use two carriers at the same time, you can program the side key to do pretty much anything.
You want, in my case, google assistant and the camera, depending on how long you press it there’s a notification led which i always like to see and if there’s one upside to a small and dim screen. It’S that pairing it with a pretty big battery means pretty long endurance. If you use it mainly for messaging, this could genuinely be a two-day phone and that by itself might make all that added chunk worth it. And the final bright point is the price the titan slim begins crowdfunding in may 2022 and unihertz tells me it will be priced under 300..
That’S very cheap and i’m glad that people who want a blackberry with newer software than the dangerously unupdated key twos still out there have something to turn to now, but unihertz’s titan pocket is the same price and for my money, that’s a much better blackberry clone than This cheap imitation, while i love that unihertz, is almost single-handedly carrying the weird phone torch and i hope it keeps doing its thing. We’Ve seen that it can do better than the titan slam. This review was shot following one week with the titan slim review sample provided by unihertz, but, as always, the manufacturer had no creative or editorial input into this content.
It didn’t pay for this coverage and it didn’t even get an early preview of this video. Please subscribe. If you’d like to see more content like this on youtube until next time, i’ve been michael fisher thanks for watching and stay mobile. My friends .