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Using the Bluetooth keyboard under the iPad

Well, I mentioned I’d attach a bluetooth keyboard to the iPad to try it out and that’s exactly what I did. The results are better than with the regular keyboard but still not ideal.

Of course typing with a real keyboard is going to feel great. The problem is that it’s just field typing. On most of the apps, tabs don’t work to move from field to field, and the PageUp/PageDown keys on the small apple bluetooth keyboard (Fn and Up/Down) are not wired in at all.

All the media function keys, however (from the brightness controls of F1&2 to the media and volume controls on F7 through F12) work fine. Which underscores the idea that this is a media consumption device more than a production device.

2 Comments

  1. Rob

    I hear that the same basic system-wide emacs editing keys work in fields though (ctrl-a for beginning of line, ctrl-e for end of line, ctrl-d for delete, etc…), at least in standard text fields, that’s a pretty huge win imo. I never use the arrow keys on a Mac…

    • David Martinez

      Yes, that works. However it’s a real annoyance to have to move your hand out to the screen because tab doesn’t move between fields. It’s like that annoyance we feel when we have to move our hand to the mouse which compounds the longer you have to move your hand.
      The nice thing is that all this can still be fixed in software still.

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