Ipad Keyboard

[Stuuk1]

Does anyone have / use a Bluetooth keyboard with their ipad?

I'm very tempted to buy one as they are only on eBay for £10 - £20 for a genuine apple one..

Are they any good? Leggy at all while typing etc? I'm thinking it may be handy to have on my desk at work to quickly reply to emails rather than switching screens etc unless adding attachments if course.

Cheers

[Tomor]

My sister has one on her iPad. about £30 from amazon i think it was, one of those cases with a keyboard built in and a stand on the back to you can use it like a netbook. I was very impressed when I had a go. No lag to speak of and easy to use!

[Nick762]

I got myself an iPad mini just before Christmas and while I'm happy enough with the on screen keyboard I thought for any serious writing I'd try a Bluetooth keyboard. I got the official Apple one which is very nice, works well although if you do a bit of digging about on the net there are others which are functionally as good and less pricey.

What surprised me a bit was that while its great for text entry, there is no simple way to use the keyboard to navigate around between apps or screens, even tabbing between fields is problematic. As I understand it, Apple's approach is that an iPad with a keyboard is a MacBook Air so they have not made external keyboard integration with IOS devices a priority. Having said that, I believe that they make a keyboard dock of some sort.

There are a number of workarounds. I haven't Jailbroken my iPad yet so have not looked into "unofficial" solutions (although my iPhone is JB'd, maybe I should investigate down that path). You can however tweak the accessibility options to gain the ability to move around a little more but I found this far from ideal. There's plenty of websites which explain how to do this.

For extended text input taking advantage of many of the standard keyboard shortcuts tho, it works just fine without any tweaking and ANY Bluetooth keyboard should do the job.

[Stuuk1]

Interesting, I think I might have to get one!

I used to JB every iDevice I had, but got fed up of updates worth updating to appearing and me not being about to update until a JB was released...

[Stuuk1]

Nothing like a thread ressurection!

Went and bought the cheap keyboard from ebay... just one problem apart from the 'o' key working intermittently.

how on earth do you detach the keyboard when its mounted on the ipad as a cover? Just broke my damn nail trying to prise it apart!

cheers

[phil24_7]

My laptop has a keyboard attached and is included in the price! ;)

[Nick762]

Interesting, I think I might have to get one!

I used to JB every iDevice I had, but got fed up of updates worth updating to appearing and me not being about to update until a JB was released...

Still JB my iPhone, main reason is that with the smaller screen I like to be able to cram as many apps into folders as I like, not limit it to the dozen or so Apple let you have and the five icon dock beats the default four. Also I find being able to access settings with a single swipe of a finger far easier than navigating through menus. With my iPad on the other hand I don't feel the need to JB as the screen is bigger, you're allowed six icons in the dock as standard and the settings menu seems better laid out. Thing is I grew up with Palm PDAs which you can customise ad infinitum, I think the biggest disappointment I had with the iPhone was finding out just how limited the custom options were.