If you enjoy photo-blogging from your iPhone like me, you'll find that the thing that slows you down is the one-finger typing on the iPhone screen. If you are a touch-typer on a regular keyboard, this is painful! Especially if you are an addicted blog-from-playground kinda mom like me and you want to say more than 10 words. Now you can. You need to get a bluetooth keyboard for your iPhone, like the iGo "Think Outside" keyboard I just got! (Thank you dearest hubby. You are wonderful. Happy birthday to me!)
The iGo requires the installation of the "keyboard" app on your iPhone (costs $5). Once you install that, and your iGo keyboard is unfolded and juiced up with batteries, you press "Ctrl-Fn-Fn" (control key + blue Fn key + green Fn key) and the keyboard app will "discover" your keyboard. Once it's on, you can then use the keyboard to rattle out some paragraphs of text (emails, mostly) that would take 10x longer using the iPhone touch screen.
The photos show the iGo keyboard folded up (it even has a nice little black carry-case not shown), unfolded (pretty sturdy! but it tends to be a bit "tippy" if you have it on a solid surface rather than in your lap), and in use. I had it set up on my laptop so I could go between blogging from iPhone (where the pictures are easily emailed to posterous to update the blogs), and using my laptop to view the blogs.
Cons: It's a bit awkward using the Fn keys for the numbers and special characters. The "/" slash key is in a weird place. (for a person who types HTML...) However these lessor-used keys don't typically slow you down that much, and the speed gained with the A-Z + punctuation far outweigh the annoyance of re-learning some of the other keys. If it's on a flat surface, and you press any key to the far left or right of the keyboard, it tips down (a little annoying). The tab key doesn't move you between fields when composing an email (grrrr). There might be a workaround to this that I'm unaware of, but for now I have to screen-touch to get from the "to" field to "subject" to "email body". Bit of a pain.
Pros: fast typing! Text output is 10x what you would normally do using your iPhone to blog. Small size is easily portable. I just stack it with my phone and it feels like you're carrying a small trade paperback book.
In my books this is an essential upgrade for touch-type phone bloggers.
You can buy this keyboard on Amazon for $169.00 here:
Wow that is a tiny keyboard, looking closely at it there's not even numberic keys on the top row, but rather you look like you'd have to press the "Fn" keys to get them numbers! Wow. Guess it's still better than the touch screen!
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