Is there any value in a folding bluetooth keyboard?

Right, so I use Dragon Dictation for those smaller, easier text input to my iPhone, but for those longer jobs how about a swanky folding bluetooth keyboard. Well, I think it would be difficult to retain my geek classification if I didn’t just go and buy one.

eBay was the place, 25 squid was the price and before I knew it I had a Micro Innovations Folding Bluetooth Keyboard in front of me.

Right, to start… it’s small. When folded, it’s just slightly bigger than the iPhone. It opens out to exactly double that size. As a direct result of this the keys are not exactly massive and the first reaction was it was all too small. My error rate went through the roof, which was quite surprising because I’m not the best typist by any standard! However, I stuck with it and quickly got the hang of it. It took just a few minutes of use to get myself comfortable, learn where all the keys are and get into a routine where my typing has a level of accuracy I was happy with.

Pairing was straight forward enough and the keyboard sprang into life. Working through the various applications, I was quite surprised to see that keyboard support is pretty good across all the apps.

So what is the advantage of a keyboard? After all, the on-screen keyboard is very useable. Well, for me my initial interest was nothing more than that. Interest. Having said that, I can actually type significantly quicker on the keyboard than on the ‘on-screen’ keyboard. Especially since all the Apple predictive text and error correction tools still operate. The other hidden bonus is that the on screen keyboard is removed when a bluetooth keyboard is enabled. This gives the full screen over to text, especially useful in landscape mode.

So where does this new toy fit in my iPhone input space? Well, I think it pans out something like this:

• Dragon Dictation: Short email, text and tweets from a quiet (ish) environment.
• Keyboard: Long emails, blogs, etc when sat with a table in front of me
• Onscreen keyboard: Everything else!

So there we go. Another day, another gadget…