The first machine Michael Fisher loved was not a phone. His father built it when Michael was about two: a suitcase-sized wooden box crowded with toggle switches and buttons. Each one made something happen. Lights blinked. Buzzers sounded. Motors moved. It was named, with excellent parental directness, Mike’s Electronic Busy Box. Years later, when Fisher described it in an interview, the memory still seemed to hold the point of the exercise: a finger pressed a real control, and the world answered.
There is a neat line from that box to the physical keys of Clicks, the mobile company he helped found. Real careers seldom travel by neat lines. Fisher wanted to act. He filmed little boats. He read tech blogs after rehearsals. He wrote phone reviews and learned how to make a lens linger on the hinge, the casing, the small decisions that separate an object you use from one you enjoy using. Only after years of examining other people’s devices did he become part of a team making one.
A prop from the future
Fisher grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1990s. Its portable devices made the future look handheld. The communicators, PADDs and tricorders were fictional, but the attraction was specific: information and conversation could travel with a person. In a Samsung Display interview, Fisher said that when real equivalents began appearing, he became equally absorbed by them. A phone, to him, was never merely a list of specifications. It was a little piece of tomorrow with fingerprints on it.
His first mobile phone, bought at eighteen, was a Samsung SCH-3500. He chose a handset that folded, just as many of his friends had, and the resemblance to a Star Trek communicator did no harm. The detail is charming because it predates flexible glass and billion-dollar foldable launches. He liked the simple act of opening the thing. The pleasure was mechanical before it was futuristic.
That curiosity remained visible long after the industry settled on slabs of glass. His video series When Phones Were Fun has revisited the Motorola StarTAC, the Sidekick, unusual Samsung designs and other handsets from a period when a phone could swivel, slide, fold or announce itself with a keyboard. The series is funny partly because yesterday’s bold answer can become today’s baffling artifact. But it also records a useful fact about design: the present layout was chosen, and another layout can be chosen again.
The actor finds a different stage
Fisher arrived at Old Dominion University hoping to join the Navy. He left in 2008 with a theater degree. On campus he spent time onstage, and his work extended to a Discovery Channel program, regional commercials and instructional videos made for the Navy. After graduation came voiceover work, including recordings for law students. It was an actor’s patchwork: different audiences, different scripts, a practiced need to make every line land.
Meanwhile, he and his father were making their own videos. From 2006 they uploaded clips of remote-control boats, submarines and model Titanic sinkings to YouTube. They filmed the models on Long Island, with Fisher behind the camera. He later recalled being startled when Google sent a note asking for tax information so he could collect earnings. The hobby had acquired an income before it had acquired a business plan. Fisher said that across nearly a hundred uploads, those early videos eventually drew more than 120 million views.
After rehearsals, he read technology blogs to unwind. By 2012, he had turned that habit into a job at Pocketnow, writing reviews and producing videos. It was a bridge between his two sets of skills: the performer who knew what a camera and a voice could do, and the gadget enthusiast who had a reason to turn the object over before praising it. At Pocketnow he learned the pace of mobile journalism, the cycle of launches and deadlines, and the less glamorous work of explaining why a feature matters after the stage lights have gone down.
That path helps explain the sound of a MrMobile video. Fisher does not need to invent a voice for the camera; he has worked with one for years. His scripts can be playful without forgetting the person deciding whether to spend money. A screen that looks wonderful in a launch presentation still has to work on a train. A foldable has to fit in a pocket. A clever input method must remain clever after the tenth message, when novelty has quietly left the room.
The name on the screen
In 2016, Mobile Nations asked Fisher to build a new YouTube technology channel. MrMobile was the result. The name sounded like a comic-book identity, appropriately enough for someone who liked science fiction and had trained for a stage. The assignment, though, was practical: make reviews about the experience of living with portable devices. At launch, the idea was to cover the breadth of “mobile,” rather than become the voice of one operating system or one website.
The distinction mattered. Phones had become predictable enough that a reviewer could disappear into benchmark tables. Fisher kept looking for the odd use case, the detail that changed how an object behaved in a hand. His coverage ranged beyond phones to watches, laptops and other devices people carried. He returned repeatedly to foldables, at one point telling Samsung Display that they had entirely replaced his tablet and taken the place of his laptop about a fifth of the time. That was an observation from his own use, not a promise about everybody else’s.
He also interviewed Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer associated with the first handheld cellular phone. Fisher raised a favorite science-fiction question: had Star Trek inspired the invention? Cooper pushed back and pointed instead toward Dick Tracy. It was a small, delightful correction. Fisher, who had grown up loving the fictional communicator, let the engineer complicate the story. A gadget myth made a good hook; the person who built the gadget had a better answer.
There was another complication in Fisher’s own work. MrMobile mixed conventional reviews with the commercial realities of a large video brand. In a published ethics statement, he laid out how sponsored segments were labeled, how review devices were handled and why companies could not preview his reviews. He described audience trust as the condition on which the whole enterprise rested. The policy was written before Clicks, but its central question would follow him into the next phase: how clearly can a creator show the audience where his roles begin and end?
The critic becomes a co-founder
Clicks Technology appeared in January 2024 with a peculiar proposition for an iPhone: give it a real keyboard. Fisher co-founded the company with Kevin Michaluk, known to many phone enthusiasts as CrackBerry Kevin, alongside a team drawn from mobile hardware. The first Clicks accessory moved typing off the touchscreen and placed rows of physical keys below it. Its argument was tactile and visual at once. Fingers could feel where they were going; the screen could show more of the work.
For Fisher, who had spent so long asking manufacturers why their phones worked the way they did, this was a change of position. A critic can call a key mushy. A builder must decide how firm it should be. A reviewer can ask whether a keyboard improves a journey; a co-founder has to survive the return trip, the charging cable, the case, the typo. Clicks expanded its keyboard accessories to selected Android phones in 2025. The company said it had sold more than 100,000 keyboards across more than 100 countries by that announcement.
The company’s next move went further. In January 2026 it showed the Communicator, a compact Android phone with a built-in keyboard and a design centered on messaging. At CES, a Clicks co-founder described the team debating key pressure in grams. It is the sort of dispute that would sound absurd at a dinner party until everyone at the table begins telling stories about the keyboard they once loved. Hardware lives in these minute decisions. A fraction of travel or resistance can make a sentence pleasant to type, or make it feel like a small administrative penalty.
The Communicator was presented as a device for people who want to communicate with more intention. That is a claim the finished phone, and its users, will have to test. Fisher’s involvement gives the claim a history. He has been making the case for interesting mobile hardware since before it was fashionable to call a physical keyboard a comeback. His first folding Samsung and his old-phone videos are evidence of a taste that lasted beyond a trend cycle.
The question beneath the keys
Fisher once told young video makers to avoid pinning their worth on subscriber counts. What mattered, he said, was having something different to say, or saying it differently. The advice sounds less like a slogan when set beside his own route: a theater student, a voice actor, a maker of miniature-boat videos, a tech editor, a host and finally a founder. None of those roles cancelled the others. Each supplied a tool for the next.
His taste has remained unusually consistent. The boy who liked switches grew into an adult who could explain why a hinge mattered. The Star Trek fan made room for an inventor to correct a Star Trek myth. The reviewer who wrote publicly about trust became a co-founder whose product can be judged by the same audience he spent years teaching to look closely. That last turn is the most interesting one, because the scrutiny now runs in both directions.
A good keyboard is a modest ambition compared with the futures promised at a trade show. It asks only that the thumb find its place, that an idea become words, that a message leave the pocket without fuss. Fisher has spent much of his career examining the distance between a gadget’s promise and an ordinary Tuesday. Clicks puts that examination into an object. Press a button. See what happens.