LAS VEGAS—The Droid is back. At CES today, Motorola announced a slide-out QWERTY keyboard mod for the Moto Z series phones, which basically turns Motorola's latest flagship phone back into one of the Moto Droid QWERTY sliders that helped make Android popular back in 2009.

The company also announced an ambitious health-monitoring mod, which could become a big deal for clinics and home health care agencies.

Livermorium's $99 Slider Keyboard Moto Mod, coming "later this winter," will appeal to a lot of hardcore QWERTY lovers who I know still read PCMag. The white plastic keyboard snaps onto the back of the phone, slides out, and also tilts into a laptop-like mode. The keys are small and hard, but well-spaced. Function keys let you select items on the phone's screen and alter settings like volume without having to touch the screen.

The keyboard mod, a Moto presenter told me, becomes most useful when you're in split-screen multitasking mode, because then you don't end up with some of your screen space taken up by an on-screen keyboard.

The mod definitely made the phone thicker and heavier. It was narrow enough that I could still operate it comfortably with both thumbs, but just barely. (I have relatively small hands.) The balance was good, though: both held in my hand as a flat slider, and propped up on the table in its laptop-like mode, the phone wasn't overbalanced in either direction.

I found the Livermorium mod's keyboard less fun to use than the BlackBerry KeyOne, but of course the KeyOne is a totally different form factor—it's a lighter, slimmer portrait-style candybar phone. You get a heck of a lot more screen real estate with a Moto Z or Z2 using the Livermorium mod, at the cost of weight and size. The keyboard mod won Motorola's Indiegogo mod challenge last year, and the phone company is running the promotion again this year, taking proposals through February 6 from mod creators who might end up with developer kits.

Checking Your Vitals

The second new mod, the Lenovo Vital Moto Mod, is a lot more involved than Livermorium's keyboard. It's a thick slab of a device, about as hefty as a paperback novella, which has an infrared thermometer and a little blood-pressure cuff where you stick your finger. Stick your finger into the cuff, and two minutes later you'll have recorded your heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen level. Point it at your head, and you'll get your temperature.

I stuck my finger into the little cuff and it tightened around my finger like a blood-pressure cuff (which it is). The whole measurement process was painless.

While the mod isn't FDA approved, it's HIPAA compliant, and the data can then be shared with a healthcare provider or uploaded to a fitness app.

At $395 when this comes out in April, I don't see this mod as a major consumer product. Rather, it's a lower-cost, super-portable way for people like home health care aides and mobile clinic workers to check vitals. Or, it could be supplied by insurers or healthcare companies to older people who are monitoring their vitals on a daily basis. The folks from Vital had to play up the fitness-enthusiast angle because they're still working through FDA compliance, but I think that's where they're headed.