A company called Scholastic, presumably not the book company, has released these odd texting devices that work wirelessly within 600 feet of each other. You can create a network of 24 of them and messages are truncated at 40 characters.
The keyboard looks sort of like the RIM multi-tap keyboard of yore and at $16 I can’t imagine these are anything but a close-out from some forgotten time when kids didn’t have cellphones.