I hope the next iPhone revision will take a cue from the new iPad and also support bluetooth keyboards. When I travel, I often just want to write – email, journal, blog, whatever. For this longer-form writing I don’t need a screen any bigger than the iPhone, but I do need a physical keyboard because typing on the on-screen one is so painfully slow. (I’ve gotten faster over time on the iPhone, but still nowhere the 80 words per minute that I type on my laptop.)
Back in the day (not that long ago, really) I used to travel with a Handspring Visor (a relative of the Palm Pilot) and a physical keyboard that folded up into an amazingly small package about the size of an iPhone (but an inch thick). The combination took up very little space in my backpack and weighed a total of about half a pound. For many years, in fact, the only time I ever wrote in my journal was on airplanes. I’d just whip out the PDA and keyboard and start typing away.
I don’t think that fold-up keyboard manufacturer ever sold enough to be profitable. Maybe now that so many people have smartphones, it would be a different story. On the other hand, maybe Apple has little motivation to support external keyboards for iPhone, because then we’d have less reason to buy an iPad…
I found a similar blog post after Googling a bit.