My full-keyboard phone arrives today. I'm a fairly recent convert to texting, and I like it better than talking on the phone.

It's also cheaper, and, more importantly for a survival situation, in a large-scale emergency you can get texts out even when the cell/land lines are completely crashed by the panicked crowds.

On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings the local cell system and the campus phone system were completely overwhelmed. I was still able to text my brothers almost instantaneously and receive their replies. You can also enter a text message and hit send when there's no signal. The phone will continue to search for a signal, and get the message out as soon as it finds one. I do that while hiking, to let my wife know when/where to come and pick me up.