Many owners of PDAs rather like the idea of using them as serious data input machines - taking advantage of the word processing or notes applications that come as standard or bulking out with something more feature-rich, and ditching the laptop.

It's a fair enough dream. But to make it happen you'll need a keyboard rather than whatever built-in text input method(s) your PDA provides. There are many keyboards choose from, and some, inevitably, are better than others.

Those from Stowaway are among the best on offer, and we found the company's new Bluetooth keyboard, which comes with drivers for Pocket PC, Symbian Series 60 and Symbian UIQ, as good as we had anticipated it might be.

We're gushing with praise primarily because the keyboard itself is superb. Full-sized and offering well-spaced keys with a good feel, you can use this keyboard to touch-type with ease. The keys are slightly raised from the casing so that there is no painful bashing of the keyboard edge.

If getting a quality typing experience is what you require, then everything else is, in a way, cosmetic, and certainly there could be a lot of leeway in living with glitches. But we found it hard to find any glitches at all.

OK, there's no separate number row, but this is a fair trade for a smaller overall size. The keyboard folds down along a central hinge into a package measuring 139mm x 99mm x 13mm and weighing 160g. Its outer casing is strong, but for that added extra bit of protection when it's flopping about in a bag, it comes with a soft case.

Your PDA must have Bluetooth support, either built-in or added on later through an SD card or other means. Installing the drivers is a breeze, as is popping the twin AAA batteries that power the keyboard into their slot. From there on in, turning Bluetooth on in your PDA and a quick keyboard combination are all that's required to connect.

There are some keyboard shortcuts to help with launching applications and such like. These could be useful partly as an aide to speedy working, but also because the stand which holds your PDA in position is detachable from the keyboard. With Bluetooth offering a greater range than most people's eyes can match, this effectively means you can position your PDA wherever it suits you best - and this can be out of easy arm's reach, making those keyboard shortcuts handy.

You may find that perching your PDA on top of a couple of books to raise its height makes working as comfortable as possible. And the stand can be configured to hold a PDA in either portrait or landscape format, which is rather helpful.

There are less expensive PDA keyboards to be had, and you will need Bluetooth on your PDA of course. But for sheer elegance as well as enabling touch-typing speeds, the Stowaway Universal Bluetooth keyboard is a very usable choice.