The newest tool in Apple’s business arsenal is starting to see its accessories arrive in customer hands and on hooks at the local Apple retail store. But many more providers are waiting until the end of this month to roll out the business suits that iPads will wear on client visits: covers and cases.
One significant accessory that arrived in our offices yesterday was the iPad Keyboard Dock. At $69 it’s priced at about 10 percent of the cost of a top-end WiFi iPad, and it is a slim offering indeed. Think of Apple’s standard mini-keyboard, then slap on a plastic extender with a mini-USB port and external headphone outlet, and you’ve got the total feature set of the Keyboard Dock.
The Keyboard Dock only extends the keyboard width about a total of 3 inches from the on-screen keyboard in the iPad’s landscape mode. But since the iPad has no dock on its longer side, you can only use the Keyboard Dock in portrait mode. If you’re still looking for a dock for your iPad, in these early days of the tablet’s life you could do worse than getting a Keyboard Dock. Apple’s standard iPad dock sells for $29, and its wireless keyboard, sans dock but able to talk to the iPad, sells for the same price as a Keyboard Dock.
The feel of the Keyboard Dock will make creating a document much easier, since the tactile response of the keys helps in speed and accuracy. The smaller keyboard takes some getting used to if you’ve been working with a Mac or a MacBook that has a wider keyboard.
The Keyboard Dock shows another advantage to the onscreen keyboard: it has the apostrophe key where your fingers have come to expect it, rather than on a numbers-symbols keyboard level. On the iPad that apostrophe inserts itself, and then the keyboard reverts to ABC format. But this is a nuance of the on-screen keypad that slowed me up to near-iPhone data entry speeds.
There are a few extras to the Keyboard Dock that might make the $69 seem worthwhile. It includes a brightness control pair of buttons and controls for the track and volume settings of the iPod app. You can lock the iPad with a button along the top of the keyboard, or start up a slideshow that you’ve configured with the iPad’s Settings. But perhaps the most significant addition is the arrow keys. While the multitouch interface of the iPad is a marvel, selecting an insertion point for text editing is still trial and error for me, even after more than a year’s use of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Arrow keys make the select process quick and accurate.
Like the $29 Dock, the Keyboard Dock makes a nice stand for the iPad to charge and display slideshows, although the quickest charge is still going to come from an electrical outlet and the included mini-brick. The Keyboard Dock comes with no additional USB ports.
It seems likely that third party companies such as Belkin or Kensington will create competing keyboards for the iPad. At the moment you can’t even get a keyboard in the Apple retail stores, or online, for deliver any earlier than the end of April. Apple delivered ours yesterday by UPS, with no signature required.
Recent Comments