for convenience

Probably for as long as I've been able to type fluently I've probably been capable of typing faster than I can write in longhand, increasingly so as my typing improves and my longhand atrophies through non-use further from its never-exactly-tidy initial condition.
A few mobile handsets ago I was seriously considering attempting to get hold of the 6820 purely because it folded out lengthways to reveal a QWERTY keyboard (albeit a necessarily small one). I basically just wanted a laptop but had to delay that for a few years but in the end settled for picking up a secondhand Jornada from eBay just so that I had something portable and typey in the hope that I'd find it significantly easier and quicker to get things written down (and in a tidier and more easily-used form) than using a standard pencil and notebook. For a while the Jornada sat in my camera bag and was used as much as was possible but was eventually retired when it started being completely unable to hold any significant charge for any length of time sometime in late 2007.
Although I converted to laptop early last year there's still a gap in the extremely-portable category which pencil and notebook still had to fill. Netbooks are looking better and better all the time and I expect I'll start attempting to find an excuse to get one at some point but in the meantime I finally decided (after a year or so of pondering) to get a little folding portable Bluetooth keyboard which speaks to my phone and allows me to generate electric text at almost the same speed as would be possible with a full-sized keyboard. Most of the delays occur when pausing to search for non-letter characters as various combination of function and shift must be pressed but it's one hell of a lot faster than even the fastest phone-keypad typing and significantly less noisy. The only disadvantage is a that a flat surface is highly recommended though the standard approved mini-keyboard two-thumb-typing technique can be used where no flat surface is available and will be easier when a method is devised of attaching the handset to the keyboard's little slide-out cradle. It looks a little bit twatty but so does sitting there stabbing furiously at a phone keypad when attempting to type quickly. Most handy for blipping, too; it shall be most useful on the next holiday along with me during which I have decided the laptop not to take (partly to reduce theft-paranoia and mostly because we won't be staying anywhere with known wirelessness). I may attempt to employ a crude form of processing-free blipping by using a phone-friendly micro-SD card for occasional shots (hopefully remembering to go into RAW + jpeg mode first) which can then be cropped, crudely-brightnenedordarkened and then finaly uploaded from the phone if any free wireless is detected anywhere. At the very least I shall be able to write things as each day passes; pictures can be edited any time but I tend to have much less writing on days when I don't do the typing on the day.

Caught Frost/Nixon before it got demoted any further than screen 2 of the Filmhouse. Not quite as good as expected but still worth seeing. Sheen very good. Definitely noticeably formerly a play.