I just got hold of an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, and paired it up with my iPad. The practical upshot is, I can type long text more comfortably.
However, the experience is far from perfect, and nowhere near as polished as the rest of the experience I’ve been having with my iPad so far:
- There is no support for my keyboard (Swiss-French) layout in iOS 3.2. I’m lucky in that I didn’t pay for the keyboard, I was given it. But if I’d had to fork over CHF 99.- I would be incensed. Apple actually has the gall to offer this item as an official accessory to the iPad on the Swiss site and in its store without actually supporting it. That’s like BMW suggesting that a particular set of tyres would be a great accessory to my car, without mentioning that they won’t actually fit the rims I they shipped the car with. So the closest layout I’ve found to Swiss-French or Swiss-German is German; at least all the letters are in the right place, but most of the shifted and optioned characters are elsewhere, and I have to pop up the on-screen keyboard to find them. Bad, bad Apple!
- You get a few common shortcuts such as Cmd-X -C and -V for cut/copy/paste, but even in Pages no support for Cmd-I or Cmd-B to do italics and bold. Another absolutely glaring oversight!
- Turning the keyboard on and off is slow, and sometimes the power key “bounces”, meaning the keyboard turns itself on again and reconnects to the iPad. Kind of a pain when you’re trying to stow it and go back to the on-screen keyboard. But this point is just nit-picking compared to the previous two.
I really, really hope Apple gets its keyboard shit together in an upcoming release (iOS 4 maybe, but I really think they should push out an interim iOS 3.2.x release to address this), because as it stands, the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is an almost-complete rip-off.
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