This is one of the many[1] reminders that a lot of people want a smartphone with a hardware keyboard.
Personally I have a small bluetooth mechanical keyboard, it saved me a couple of times when I wanted to do heavy text editing and only had a smartphone with me.
I would welcome another option - small like this one - for casual texting and gaming.
The traditional tiny keyboard is optimized for ease of onboarding, but it sucks to actually type on with any speed. The thing posted has a steeper learning curve, but can be used to type quickly and without even having to glance at the actual keyboard. You can keep it at the back of your phone, or in the pocket of your coat, or have it mounted on the handlebars of your bike. (Actually you can have all three, connecting via Bluetooth.)
AFAIK this is the kind of keyboard military pilots use to quickly type things; you don't have room for a QWERTY keyboard in a jet fighter cockpit.
What I badly miss on the example layout is navigation and manipulation keys. Semicolon + D and semicolon + K have ample room to put there left and right arrows, ctrl + left and right arrows (word navigation), home, end. Somewhere else should be select mode (maybe while holding A), so that the arrows had the shift modifier (selecting) and copy and paste commands (sending ctrl+C and ctrl+V).
OTOH navigation and editing is a separate enough activity to warrant traditional layer switching aka modal editing.
Morse code beats all of these. Steepest learning curve, but fastest entry. At one point I remember people talking about modifying dumb phones (pre iPhone era) to have the ability to enter Morse code via a hardware button on the side of the phone.
The world would be such a different place if Morse code was taught in schools alongside other basics we learn.
If all you care about is typing a stream of letters and numbers, this is indeed so.
But I very often need editing things, moving text around, selecting, altering words, copying and pasting. I need upper case and lower case, fancy punctuation characters, etc.
Not that a proper Morse code mode can't be invented for that: vi gives us an example of such an interface, based entirely on letters and mode-switching.
BTW Morse code is relatively slow to enter by fingers alone, the muscles are too weak for the mass. A proper entry key is fast because it uses muscles of the entire arm.
The only portable keyboard that I enjoyed using is the Think Outside keyboard [1]. It is a great compromise between portability and usability. But a lot of shortcuts are not working on moderne devices. It even works as a stand for the phone. But it uses 2 AAA batteries. I wonder if it would be possible to flash it to work with modern devices or even better, customize it.
I think the concept of not wanting to use touch keyboards on a smartphone is wildy more popular than actually wanting a hardware keyboard on your smartphone. I.e. 900 upvotes is probably more to say people dislike where they have to settle more than many liking the idea (and practice) of actually changing their choice of compromises. It'd be so frickin' convenient but, at the same time, so is basically any other concept that would take up a ton more of your pocket/hand space.
On that front I'm surprised Clicks doesn't have any options at all to have it double as an extra external battery. The size of the external battery case market is probably 50x+ the volume of the external keyboard market and that'd be a pretty unique differentiator in that segment. It's even something they responded to in their FAQ.
The general point could be "people value modularity".
The phone keyboard doesn't need to be baked in, if it can come into action fast enough for the use case. It would be the same for tablets, where being able to switch between a lighter screen only mode and a heavier keyboard+trackpad setup is a big advantage.
Even laptops would fit that niche in a different way, where docking to a full input+output setup is an option.
Personally I have a small bluetooth mechanical keyboard, it saved me a couple of times when I wanted to do heavy text editing and only had a smartphone with me.
I would welcome another option - small like this one - for casual texting and gaming.
[1]: 900+ votes for a keyboard case here earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38871987