Tom Insam

The iPad keyboard

I got me an iPad.

The keyboard is good. I can certainly touch-type in landscape mode. Something that surprised me is that I can touch-type on the pixel-doubled iPhone keyboard almost as easily. (Why am I using pixel-doubled iPhone apps? Carcassonne.)

There's a tiny thing that bothers me about it, though I will need to explain some background.

On the iPad keyboard, you can hold shift with one finger and tap a letter with another finger to get a capital letter. Of course you can, that's how shift keys work. You can also press your finger onto the shift key, drag to the letter you want, and let go, and get a capital letter that way. Also nice, and I use this all the time on the iPhone, so it's what I expected.

The 'numeric' key in the bottom-left that alters the keyboard to type numbers and punctuation also does the press-slide-release thing. But it doesn't do the 'hold the key and tap the letter' thing.

Now, this keyboard is so large that I never do the press and slide thing - I'm using two hands here, and the letter I want is a long way from the shift key. On the iPhone I always do the side thing because I'm typing with my thumb. So the iPhone is fine, but I'm finding typing numbers on the iPad harder because you have to tap numeric tap number tap numeric again to type a single number.

Of course, as is usual with Apple hardware, on any lesser device I'd just be thankful I had a keyboard that I could type on. Only Apple stuff is good enough that the tiny things annoy you.