TCL's short-lived reboot of the BlackBerry brand proved that there's still a market for phones with physical keyboards. The Fxtec Pro1 was released last year as an all-encompassing productivity station, with a sliding horizontal keyboard and multiple operating systems to choose from. Fxtec is now unveiling an upgraded model, which has the distinction of being the first phone to ship with LineageOS.

The new Pro1-X model is a slight hardware revision, with twice the storage and 2GB more RAM. However, it's still using the same Snapdragon 835 chipset, which was already two years old when the Pro1 was first released. It's still a flagship-class SoC, but one that is about to be four generations out of date, so it remains to be seen if performance will be enough for a productivity-heavy device like the Pro1-X.

SPECS

Display

6" 2160 x 1080 AMOLED, Gorilla Glass 3

Chipset

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835

RAM

8GB

Storage

256GB UFS 2.1, microSD card support up to 2TB

Keyboard

Landscape QWERTY backlit keyboard, 5 rows, 66 keys (QWERTZ layout available in Europe)

Camera

12MP rear, 8MP front

Connectivity

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 + LE, NFC, USB Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack

Battery

3,200mAh, Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0

Dimensions

154 x 73.6 x 13.98 mm

The main attraction here is the slide-out horizontal keyboard, which has the same 66-key layout as the original Pro1. Since the display has a slight angle when the keyboard is opened, you can sit the Pro1-X on a table or desk and use it like a laptop for ants. There's even dedicated CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys, which could come in handy for shortcuts or remote desktop sessions.

Fxtec is shipping the Pro1-X with two choices for the operating system: LineageOS, the super popular custom ROM, or Ubuntu Touch. If you opt for Ubuntu Touch, you can connect an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse to get a full desktop Linux environment. The software was built in cooperation with XDA Developers, hence the XDA logo on the back of some models.

The Fxtec Pro1-X is available starting today on Indiegogo. You can pick one up from the link below.

Buy: Indiegogo