The Phone That Does Less on Purpose

A few months ago, when scrolling through YouTube, I came across a video of a phone that reminded me of a BlackBerry — something I hadn’t seen since my teenage years. It has the size of an iPhone 4, the screen takes up two-thirds of the space, and the rest is a keyboard. I ended up watching the whole thing.

We’re so used to smartphones being built around a single logic: more screen, more apps, more access — Apple, Google, and Samsung have spent the last decade competing on who can deliver more of everything, faster. This was the opposite. From what I could tell, the entire pitch was: WhatsApp, Gmail, Slack. Respond to what matters, then put it down. Its purpose is written into the name — Clicks Communicator.

So when I sat down with Liangchen Chen, Clicks Technology’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, it wasn’t surprising that this came up almost immediately. “We wanted a purpose-built tech tool that does the communicating really well,” he told me. “So we designed the product with the thought of — pay attention to it, or don’t. A lot of things are designed on purpose.”

We started with how he got here.

Liangchen grew up in China and moved to England at eighteen. He studied chemistry at university — not an obvious path to consumer electronics — but the thread connecting his career was always a Nokia N900 he’d carried since his student years. It was a Linux-based slider phone, small enough for a crowded tube carriage, with a physical keyboard that let him run terminal commands on the go. When Nokia stopped making it, and then stopped making anything like it, he couldn’t find a replacement. Nobody was building what he wanted, so eventually, he decided to build it himself.

The first attempt came in 2017. Motorola ran a global competition for modular accessories, and Liangchen entered with a QWERTY keyboard attachment he’d designed under a name borrowed from his chemistry background — Livermorium, element 116, his birthday rendered in the periodic table. He made the final ten, flew to Chicago to pitch at Motorola’s headquarters, and got far enough that his concept was announced as a Lenovo partner at CES 2018, listed alongside Qualcomm, Google, and Microsoft. “It was very, very unbelievable,” he told me. Then, a few months before mass production, Lenovo changed direction and pulled out of the platform entirely.

That same year Liangchen met Adrian Li Mow Ching. They decided that if no large company was going to build the phone they actually wanted to use, they’d do it themselves. They renamed the venture F(x)Tec — FX for function, the mathematical symbol — and spent the next year and a half building the Pro1: a full slide-out keyboard Android phone, designed with the same engineering team behind Nokia’s original slider mechanism. Snapdragon 8 series chipset. Sony camera. Dual curve display. “We wanted to build the best,” Liangchen said. “If I do the same today, in my opinion, this would be very risky and brave.”

The first batch sold out on launch in late 2019. Then COVID hit.

I asked him directly: when F(x)Tec nearly collapsed, what really went wrong?

“When we were doing everything, we wanted to be the best,” he said, “which actually was a very risky move — if you go too premium, too high end, you end up with only one or two choices with the supply chain at most. And it became very risky if they ran into trouble. We were doomed.”

The logic sounds obvious in retrospect, but it's worth sitting with, because it runs counter to how most founders are taught to think about a first product. The instinct is to build the best version of the thing — best chip, best camera, best display — because that's what gets attention and justifies a premium price. F(x)Tec did exactly that. The Pro1 ran a flagship Snapdragon 8 series chip, a Sony camera, a dual-curve display. And the problem with best-in-class components is that, almost by definition, very few suppliers can make them. For any given part, there were one, maybe two suppliers in the world capable of delivering at the quality and volume F(x)Tec needed.

That’s fine until one of them has a bad year. When COVID hit one of their core suppliers’ cash flow, there was no fallback — no second source to switch to, no leverage to jump the queue. Production stalled. Customers who had ordered waited years. The company survived, but only just.

It wasn’t even the only time this happened. The chip in a later model reached end-of-life and became unavailable mid-production, forcing a switch to a different processor partway through. Two separate near-misses with the same root cause: a dependency the company couldn’t control and wasn’t big enough to influence.

That last part is the piece founders tend to miss. “Unless we are very big,” Liangchen said, the premium suppliers don’t treat a small company the way they treat Apple or Samsung. A tier-one supplier with a flagship component has no particular reason to prioritise a startup ordering tens of thousands of units when they have clients ordering tens of millions. So building like a flagship brand, when you have none of a flagship brand’s leverage, means inheriting all of the supply chain risk and none of the protection.

They tried to raise VC funding during the worst of it. The UK wasn’t interested in what they were building. “Everything was on software or FinTech,” Liangchen said. Hardware, particularly niche consumer hardware, wasn’t a conversation many investors wanted to have. They made it through without external capital — something he says with a sense of pride.

For the Clicks Communicator, he inverted the whole approach. The question became what’s the most replaceable component. He chose an upper-mid MediaTek chip over a flagship Snapdragon — not primarily to save money, but because the ecosystem around MediaTek is larger and more competitive. More development teams, more supplier options, more substitutes if any single one falls through. The Communicator still has features he’s proud of — an OIS camera, optical image stabilisation, which is genuinely rare in the ODM world — but even there, he chose the sensor that made the most sense for the project’s scale rather than the best one money could buy. “There are better camera modules out there,” he told me. “But overall, for us, it’s really the right choice.”

He also designed for longevity — choosing components likely to stay in production and supported for years, so he wouldn’t get caught again by a part going end-of-life mid-build.

It adds up to a framework worth writing down, especially for anyone building physical product at small scale. A premium component could be your single point of failure, and a startup is the least equipped party in the supply chain to absorb that. The goal is to build the most resilient product, which often means deliberately not reaching for the best part on the market. And in an era of escalating trade tensions and fragmented global supply chains, that risk is the baseline.

“I always made a joke at the time,” he said, of the worst period at F(x)Tec. “People are asking what’s your next product — and I say, we are making sure we’re not dead first.”

Clicks came about almost by accident. Liangchen had sketched out the idea of a keyboard case for iPhone years earlier and never shown it to anyone. He assumed no one would be interested. A colleague passed it to CrackBerry Kevin — Kevin Michaluk, who had spent years running the largest BlackBerry fan community on the internet and had a ready-made audience of exactly the people who missed physical keyboards. Kevin brought in fellow content creator MrMobile and Jeff Gadway, who had led product marketing at BlackBerry during its peak years. Liangchen and Adrian came in as the technical and operational core.

I asked him what it was actually like to build a hardware company with co-founders who came from media rather than engineering — whether that created tension or clarity.

“Kevin and Jeff, they know very well how to reach the people who care about this,” he said. “I look after the engineering bits. Adrian looks after the commercial side. It works because everyone knows their role.” The launch at CES in January 2024 bore that out — the Clicks keyboard case sold 150,000 units across 100 countries in its first year, largely on the strength of an audience that already existed and already wanted the product. Clicks is now actively fundraising, which is a different conversation from the one Liangchen was having during F(x)Tec’s difficult years. A hundred fifty thousand units in a hundred countries is a harder thing to argue with than a crowdfunding campaign.

The Communicator is the next step in Liangchen’s entrepreneurial career— and in some ways, a return to the original ambition. A standalone Android phone, purposefully small, built around doing rather than doomscrolling. I asked him what sets it apart from just putting your smartphone on Do Not Disturb — something anyone can already do. He reached for an analogy.

“One of the good examples is the Kindle — people carry a Kindle alongside their phone, even though their phone can read ebooks too. But they reach for the Kindle when they want to actually read. If you need it, get the job done. But if not needed, maybe focus on real life instead of algorithms.”

The design reflects the philosophy in specific ways. The Communicator has an LED notification system — called Signal Light — positioned on the side of the device. The idea is that you can see whether something needs your attention without picking up the phone. It’s a small thing, but it’s deliberate. “Pay attention to it, or don’t,” as he put it. The device is built around that choice rather than trying to make it for you.

When Clicks launched the Communicator, the assumption was that the strongest response would come from former BlackBerry users — people nostalgic enough to want a physical keyboard back. What actually happened was different.

“To our surprise, it was actually the Gen Z and the younger generation,” Liangchen told me. “And they probably have never used a BlackBerry device in their life.”

He admitted he’s not immune to the same problem the Communicator is trying to solve. The morning of our conversation, he’d picked up his phone to check a football update — England had just announced their World Cup squad — and found himself half an hour later still reading about who was in and who was out. “It’s so distracting,” he said, with the kind of resignation that many of us echo.

I told him I understood. I’m Gen Z, and the reason I came across the Communicator in the first place was exactly that kind of fatigue — the feeling that your phone is designed to keep you on it, not help you get off it. A few weeks ago, I ran a workshop at an innovation lab at Rice University with the theme of being present as a lost art. A manager in the room described picking up his phone with something specific in mind — a quick check — and then seeing a notification about a reel a friend had sent him on Instagram. Half an hour later, he was still scrolling, and he couldn’t remember what he’d picked up his phone to do in the first place. Everyone in that room had a version of that story.

A growing number of people around the world are looking to redefine their relationships with technology to be more purposeful and intentional. The insight for Clicks isn’t just that this audience exists — but how to build a new category of smartphone with this goal at the core. The result is a product that appeals to people who’d never owned a BlackBerry buying a device that looked like one.

The geographic picture followed a similar pattern of surprises. Physical keyboards, Liangchen assumed, were a Western habit — rooted in the BlackBerry era and English-language typing conventions. Japan had other ideas.

“Japan has been one of our largest markets,” he told me, “because of the buying power, the population — but also they just love keyboard products.” The loyalty runs deep enough that one Japanese user wrote a book about the F(x)Tec Pro1 and posted a physical copy to Liangchen. When the Clicks team held a launch event in Tokyo last year, fans turned up still using their six-year-old Pro1s, holding them alongside the new Clicks products as though presenting evidence.

China was a different kind of surprise. A community of several hundred users had formed organically on RedNote — discussing the product, sharing tips — with no deliberate push from the company. “We didn’t expect people there to care about a quality keyboard,” he said. “But they like it as well.” Korea is growing too, enough that Clicks is now developing a localised keyboard layout with Korean characters printed on the keys.

The pattern across all three markets points to the same underlying thing: the Communicator isn’t really a nostalgia product. Nostalgia might bring in the forty-somethings who remember BlackBerry. It doesn’t explain a RedNote community in China or a Gen Z buyer who’s never held a physical keyboard in their life. What they’re responding to is a device with a clear reason to exist, in a market where most devices are designed to allow you to do as much on it as possible; Clicks Communicator had one purpose: to give back your time.

Clicks runs across four countries. Engineering sits in Taiwan, manufacturing and quality assurance in Shenzhen, headquarters and core operations in the UK, and the marketing and media team — Jeff Gadway, CrackBerry Kevin, and a handful of remote colleagues — in North America. “Whenever I wake up, whatever time of day, I can always find someone to talk to,” Liangchen told me, half joking. He travels to Taipei several times a year and is planning to bring the UK team there later this year — partly as a working trip, partly, he said, because a lot of them have never been to Asia.

What strikes me most about Liangchen’s story is the consistency of the bet. For almost a decade, across three different form factors and at least one near-failure, he’s been building variations of the same thing: a device that does less, on purpose, for people who actually want that. The Moto Z mod that never made it to production. The F(x)Tec Pro1 that sold out and then nearly broke the company. The Clicks Keyboard case that proved the demand was real. And now the Communicator, which is in many ways the most complete version of the original idea.

The supply chain almost ended it. Going flagship-spec on the Pro1 was also, he now understands, a misreading of what kind of company F(x)Tec actually was — a small team building for a niche, not a manufacturer with the leverage to demand preferential treatment from tier-one suppliers. The lesson he took wasn’t to build less ambitiously, but to build with a clearer sense of what he could actually control. Component replaceability. Supplier competition. Longevity over headlines. It’s a philosophy that ended up mapping onto the product itself.

Whether the Communicator finds its market at scale remains to be seen. But if the Gen Z response to the launch is anything to go by — and the RedNote community in China, and the Tokyo fans with their six-year-old Pro1s — the appetite for a phone that knows what it’s for might be larger than anyone expected. Including Liangchen.

This article was written by Nessie Chu-Heng Lu, Strategic Marketing Lead @ Founders & Funders

Liangchen Chen is the Co-founder and CTO of Clicks Technology. Leads global product development from concept to mass production, delivering multiple award-winning consumer electronics products to customers in over 160 countries.