Someone recently asked me why it is that I write about PDAs all the time in IT Week, and yet don't actually own one myself. I told them that as a journalist, any device without a keyboard wasn't much use to me, because my job largely involves typing articles. My questioner seemed satisfied with this reply, but it started me thinking. If every single one of the top-selling mobile client devices are pen-driven models such as the Palm range and HP's iPaq, what does that tell you about the way these devices are being used?

It seems that few people can honestly say they use such handhelds for serious everyday work. This suggests that most Pocket PC and Palm devices are still being used as glorified personal organisers, or at best for remotely viewing information, perhaps to check email while away from the desk. In other words, people are mostly using them as an extension of their desktop PCs, not as full clients.

The reasons for this are likely to be many and complex. Handhelds are based on different operating systems to desktops and laptops, so they can't run the same applications. And even if it were possible to run a full-blown version of Lotus Notes or Microsoft Excel on a PDA, the small screen typical of such devices would be a handicap to productivity.

But even this cannot be such a major drawback as the lack of a keyboard.

Just about any important work, from replying to an urgent email to entering information into a mobile database, is significantly slower when you have to accomplish it by tapping an on-screen keypad with a stylus or by scribbling words one at a time into a handwriting-recognition tool.

Given this difficulty, there is now a booming market in add-on keyboards for PDAs. You can get keyboards that fold up neatly into a package no larger than a handheld itself; floppy rubber keyboards that wrap around your PDA to protect it in transit; and clip-on jackets that add a tiny keypad underneath the handheld's screen.

But these solutions are rarely satisfactory. Some require you to clip your PDA precariously on top; or use an infrared link that can easily be lost if keyboard and PDA shift position even slightly. And few of these solutions come anywhere close to matching the comfort of typing on a full-size desktop keyboard.

In the past, Psion used to sell a handheld with a keyboard as good as that on some laptops, and many of the Microsoft-based Handheld PC clamshell models also had decent built-in keyboards. What happened to those models?

According to HP, which used to make the keyboard-equipped Jornada 720 series, nobody bought them because they were just too expensive. With prices starting at about £700, they cost significantly more than Pocket PC models and almost as much as budget laptops.

An analyst once told me that handhelds would eventually disappear in the face of competition from ever-cheaper laptops. If we are now stuck with no alternative to stylus-only PDAs because most buyers were only prepared to pay for the cheap option, that might turn out to be true.

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