How to use keyboard/stand without mouse?

It looks like the stand has a shoulder behind it to support the iPad. Hopefully, it was designed with this in mind. On the balance, too, it's a capacitive touch screen -- it doesn't take pressure to make it work. One needn't push it hard. People are reporting so far that there is no mouse support... since there isn't a pointer in the interface, this would rather make sense.

I think we'll have to wait for hands-ons with the stand to see if it's been well designed.

 

I can use bluetooth keyboards and mice with my Archos 9 tablet. Tested it just to make sure. It turns the 9 into a netbook though, and defeats every advantage it was supposed to have. The same will be true for the iPad. I'm 100% positive that the keyboard dock only exists so the iLife team would stop complaining how pointless their apps were on a Touchscreen-only device. Apple's multitouch Mouse might work with it and the USB adapter. Someone should try.

 

I don't think Steve Jobs would allow a mouse pointer on his precious multi-touch screen.

 

I also was wondering if the keyboard dock will work with iPhone/iPod Touch, or if Apple is going to hardware lock it so it will only work with the iPad - a la video out cable for the iPod Classic/iPod Touch/etc.

 

People wanting to know if they can use a mouse with a touchscreen device...the mind boggles.

 

Apparently the iPad keyboard dock has iPad specific function keys. While Apple has confirmed that their current BT wireless keyboards will work with the iPad, there's been no mention of any mouse or pointer support. Unless the apps are tweaked to accept mouse input, it seems rather doubtful.

 

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

No way it will support a mouse.

 

It supports a number of pointers -- the ones at the end of your hand.