iPad keyboards have become a Holy Grail of mine. I keep looking for a keyboard that includes responsive keys (no rubber, please), a complete key layout where I expect them to be, easy Bluetooth connection, plus a lightweight integrated case that travels along with the iPad easily. If you’re in business and working remotely, writing for a blog or composing a lengthy email, you’ll want this kind of mobile accessory.

Cirago, a player who’s new to me in the Apple world, has a keyboard that seems to shine like the Grail. Its Aluminum Bluetooth Keyboard Case, which it calls the IPA 6000 on the company website, is an iPad accessory that made it possible to write most of this review (using the iWriter app). Cirago’s keyboard has real keys, with response and sound that might remind you of the set you’d see on an ultrabook. Nothing toy-like here, like the Kensington Folio keyboard’s whose rubbery keys remind me of an Easy Bake oven. Or the Zagg Solo, crafted mostly out of plastic and flimsy enough to be broken in transit on my order. (Still didn’t keep Zagg from charging $69 for it.)

Hooray! There’s real keys for the apostrophe and a genuine caps lock on the IPA 6000. Cirago’s designers also have wedged 17 function keys across the top of the main keyboard. The keys do expected things like adjust brightness, volume and bring up the software-based keyboard. Plus novel things, like select everything on the screen, cut or paste. The cursor keys have been integrated to allow you to select text without pulling your hands off the keypad by just holding the shift key as you move the cursors. One of the best ways to measure the superiority of an iPad keyboard is to watch how many times you must touch the screen to get something done. The number on the IPA 6000 was nearly zero.

The layout, for the reader here who writes fast, has a few right-hand-side problems. The right shift key is positioned next to the up-cursor, and that apostrophe key rests next to the Home key. In a standard keyboard, there’s a large shift key on the right, and the return key is next to that apostrophe.

Overall, within the limits that any portable keyboard presents, I could only find one slight ding: the Bluetooth sync button. It’s small and recessed just above the main keyboard, so I had to press hard to feel the responsive click that told me I’d sent a pair-up command. On the plus side, the keyboard falls to sleep to conserve battery.

In an improvement over the competing Zagg keyboard, Cirago has included a multiple-position plastic resting tab to balance your iPad or iPhone upon. It’s a small but thoughtful improvement that comes from buying a product in the second or third generation — like a “here’s how we do this better.” You can also use the Cirago keypad  on your lap or desk without the iPad or iPhone attached. If your iPad is nearby and paired with the keyboard, your mobile device will interact with it. Unlike the earliest of Apple iPad accessories, no docking is required. You will, however, need to get accustomed to the habits of typing on a compact keyboard — true of all products in this field. Read the rest of this entry »

James A. Martin of CIO.com reports that the market is now providing iPad access to cloud versions of apps that make up Microsoft’s Office suite of programs. That’s the genuine Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although your docs live on a remote server.

OnLive Desktop (free; iPad only) from OnLive, Inc., which offers full access to cloud-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your iPad.

There’s a serious cottage industry (a matured vendor group, to be fair) of suppliers who sell iPad apps to create documents for spreadsheets, presentations, and written docs. Apple itself has released Pages and Numbers apps, and each is careful to offer a Save As option into the Microsoft doc formats. This link-to-Microsoft move might be in advance of full iOS apps for each of its programs.

This changes the game for the smaller vendors such as ByteSquared (OfficeHD for iPad) Quickoffice with its apps of the same name, plus many others. BrainShark was selling a PowerPoint slide sharing app and service at the latest Macworld. Smaller companies always live in the shadow of a larger competitor entering their market. It seems to be happening in the Office world. Now the innovation and interface of these earlier entries is going to be crucial to keep them living in that world.

The makers of the PDF reader app Readdle showed a new app with a wider range of features at the recent Macworld. The new Remarks can do plenty of things — note-taking, free-hand drawing and PDF annotating. But what struck me the most was the perfection, it seemed, of the ability to rest your wrist on the iPad glass while you write or draw with a stylus. This is a tricky thing, I’ve learned during use of other apps. Somehow the Remarks app just sensed where I’d rest my rest while I toyed with the demo at the Readdle booth. No telling the app where you were writing, or having to stay inside a safe-zone area of the iPad with your wrist.

Denys Zhadanov of Readdle told me it wasn’t easy to solve the problem. But the company, whose tech staff is based in the Ukraine, has some other impressive chops to show in the market. Readdle built Terra, one of the best alternatives to the Safari app. Zhadanov said that Apple actually made Readdle slow down the speed of Terra when introducing new programming standards for iOS. I always found Terra to be a lot better Web experience.

Remarks takes a slice of ReaddleDocs’ powerful PDF annotation tools, includes a zoom mode plus a drawing engine. It offers pens and highlighters of different colors, floating text boxes, shapes and an eraser. We’re looking forward to testing the ability to annotate PDF documents that we’ll create from Word docs, printed to PDF files using the Mac’s inbred abilities. Zhadanov said an update to Remarks later this spring will let you pass your annotated documents into your Dropbox. Remarks is on sale at the Apple iTunes App Store.