iPad Keyboards Get Physical
By Harry McCracken | Friday, December 10, 2010 at 9:58 am
Last Gadget Standing Nominee: tyPad
Price: $99
“If the iPad only had a keyboard,” I’ve sometimes thought to myself, “I could take it on short trips and leave my laptop at home.” Enter tyPad, a leatherette iPad case that happens to have a built-in Bluetooth keyboard. Open it up and the iPad stands upright like a notebook screen. The keyboard is a one-piece design rather than one with discrete, desktop-style keys, but it has a home button and a shortcut for the iPad’s search function; it charges via USB. And since it replaces the on-screen keyboard, it leaves the entire display available for other purposes–which could be handy for word-processing documents, instant-messaging sessions, and other activities which involving both typing and reading.
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February 12th, 2011 at 7:59 am
i have a kennsngton keyboard and have to go to settings & tools then to bluetooth, reconnect, type in a number that they tell me to type in on the keyboard, then it will reconnect. Whew, what a pain. Help, what am I doing wrong?
January 5th, 2012 at 3:54 am
The USB charging issue should (as far as I know) be fixable by simply using your iPad charging plug with the keyboard's own USB cable. Feel free to disabuse me of that thought if I'm missing something.
The landscape vs. portrait issue with the Apple keyboard/dock is a gripe of mine, and like you was the reason I didn't go for one. I was genuinely surprised that the iPad 2 didn't introduce a landscape port; especially since they lodged patent applications for exactly that some time before the iPad 2 was announced.