As I was walking to lunch last week in downtown Lawrence, I passed a girl walking her dog on a leash.

That’s when it hit me — my dog needed food. But I wouldn’t be able to go to the store until the evening.

So I decided to make use of my mobile phone to send my wife a quick e-mail message. Stopping at Ninth and Massachusetts streets, I started pushing the 12 alpha-numeric keys on my phone.

That’s when I realized how cumbersome e-mail seems on a mobile phone.

Fortunately, I found a canned message, “Can you pick up,” that I could get with one push of a button.

But for alphabet characters, you have to hit the number key as many as four times to cycle through to the correct letter.

I had to key in the words “dog,” which was “3-666-4” and “food,” which was “333-666-666-3.” Then I had to cycle through different screens to hunt up a question mark and a paragraph mark.

It took about five minutes to go through the process and send it. On a computer keyboard, it would have taken about 30 seconds.

After sending the e-mail, I wondered what innovations would be coming to make text messaging on a mobile phone easier.

Dictation on the go

VoiceSignal Technologies, Worton, Mass., is expected to have voice dictation for phones by the end of the year.

Currently, VoiceSignal’s software that allows voice commands to dial numbers is now available on certain Samsung, Motorola, Sendo and Panasonic phones.

According to the reviews, there’s no need to press a button or cycle through several screens on your phone — you can dial from your phone list by speaking his or her name. You can even launch an application.

VoiceSignal’s technology operates using a phonetic recognition system that does not require too much training for the software to recognize what you’re saying.

The Senseboard Virtual Keyboard consists of two hand-worn components, which use Bluetooth technology to connect with the designated computing device. It uses sensor technology to recognize the characters a user is typing.

The company says its goal is to make it as easy to use all the new features on today’s phones as it was in the past just to make a phone call.

The next phase is short dictation.

The company expects to release software in the fourth quarter of this year that will enable you to compose and send a short text message — about 160 words — over your personal digital assistant or mobile phone.

VoiceSignal is, so far, the only company that has been able to demonstrate real-time dictation on a mobile phone (or so the company claims).

Phantom keyboard

Besides voice recognition, there’s another technology coming along that would make it easier to use your mobile phone for text messaging — a virtual keyboard.

You’ve probably seen the fold-up keyboards available for personal digital assistants, or the touch-sensitive roll-up pads.

Many people use the tiny thumb QWERTY keyboards on their PDA/phones to compose messages.

There also are some products in development, such as wearable devices that wrap around your hands (www. senseboard.com) or fingers that recognize your hand movements as keystrokes (www.kittytech .com).

But one of the coolest devices that’s actually made it to market this year is the Virtual Laser Keyboard from IBIZ Technology, which costs about $99 (www.ibizpda.com).

The small device, about the size of a cigarette lighter, projects a virtual full-sized QWERTY keyboard image onto any flat surface. If you can type, you can use it.

Using infrared light, it recognizes which key you touch on the projected image of a keyboard and makes a typewriter key sound, giving you an audible feedback.

Currently, the Virtual Laser Keyboard works with many hand-held computers and with Palm’s Treo 600 phone. By the end of this year, it’s supposed to be available for many other mobile phones.

Gone to the dogs

I asked my wife later if she got the text message I sent by mobile phone. She did. But there was a glitch in my plan.

On her way out the door to the store, two of our daughters stopped her. They added items to the grocery list.

“When I got back home,” my wife said, “I realized I forgot to get the dog food.”

Later that evening, a twinge of irony hit me as I shut the door to my van.

But I shrugged it off as I headed up the driveway, lugging the 20-pound bag.