Patent ID: 7831208

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a body casing having a plurality of surfaces; an input keypad disposed on a first surface of said body casing to facilitate entry of alphanumeric data; a first button and a second button disposed on a second surface of said body casing; and complementary logic to facilitate entry of alphanumeric data and user programmable phrases in encoded representations of a variable length encoding scheme using one or more of said first button and second button, the variable length encoding scheme having a plurality of codes of various code lengths, each code of said plurality representing corresponding alphanumeric data, and each corresponding alphanumeric data being internally represented in a fixed length binary form, wherein the shortest code of the variable length encoding scheme represents a first user selectable phrase comprising a plurality of alphanumeric characters, the first user selectable phrase being selected by a user from among a plurality of phrases for representation by the shortest code, said shortest code representing said first user selectable phrase in its entirety, and wherein the second shortest code of the variable length encoding scheme represents a second user selectable phrase comprising a plurality of alphanumeric characters, the second user selectable phrase being selected by a user from among a plurality of phrases for representation by the second shortest code, said second shortest code representing said second user selectable phrase in its entirety; facilitate the user in assigning the first user selectable phrase selected by the user to the shortest code of the variable encoding scheme and in assigning the second user selectable phrase selected by the user to the second shortest code of the variable encoding scheme; in response to user entry of the shortest code using only the first button, inputting the internal representation of the first user selectable phrase in its entirety into a current application, the internal representation being in the fixed length binary form; and in response to user entry of the shortest code using only the second button, inputting the internal representation of the second user selectable phrase in its entirety into a current application, the internal representation being in the fixed length binary form.