Computers

Sharkk iPad Mini Keyboard

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Easier text entry for tablets

The Sharkk keyboard for the iPad Mini turns your iPad into a fully functional, highly portable computer. One you can do serious work on in addition to using all the apps you love.

It’s not just a keyboard, it’s clam-shell case that both protects your iPad and still allows you to use it in landscape and portrait modes. Your iPad Mini will double in thickness but the gains in utility more than compensate, in my opinion. I still marvel at the fact that I have such a powerful device in a format the size of a paperback book.

Quick list of just a few apps that become that much more useful with a proper keyboard:

1. Evernote
2. Office for iPad apps
3. Textastic (great code editor with FTP, SFTP, Dropbox, etc. integration)
4. ServerAuditor (terminal emulator)
5. Codea (kick ass Lua dev env for the iPad)
6. Trello (collaborative task organizer, very useful/flexible/powerful)
7. Editorial (text editor with integrated Python interpreter for macros, workflows, etc. Recommended)

Note: It’s not all roses. Sharkk’s quality control leaves something to be desired. I ordered 3 keyboards on Amazon that were all defective in one way or another. One email to Sharkk’s support team and they sent me a working keyboard straight away.

Note: There are two firms selling the same (presumably OEM’ed) keyboard case, Sharkk and CoverBot. Had and loved the CoverBot case with my iPad Mini but when I upgraded to an iPad Mini Retina, Apple’s updated Bluetooth stack broke a number of keyboards, including the CoverBot. The Sharkk one, however, works fine.

-- Paul Clip 04/29/15

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