There was a short while when people had already discovered (and were offered) the possibilities of text messaging, but mobile phones did not feature an easy way to type text messages (around let's say 1999). Except for Nokia phones, that were the first to (for a while exclusively) feature the T9 predictive text input algorithm. So other companies, like Ericsson, had to figure something out to make texting easier. They came up with the chatboard. I've actually used it a number of times on an Ericsson T10 phone. It's actually quite comfortable to use, but not very practical to carry around and attach it to your phone any time you want to send a text message. In time T9 became the standard, and the physical product solution chatboard, was replaced with the software product T9. The chatboard did came with a nice protective case though. It was almost as cool as those folding palm keyboards.