iPad and Blue Tooth Keyboard?

[Henry10]

I was going to purchase an iPad, partly for the fun factor and partly for a very portable solution to access my work desktop when I travel via a remote desktop program we use. It worked fine in fooling around with it in an Apple store, with one excpetion. We use the * key a lot in my work, so using the iPad keyboard would now require shuttling back and forth between 3 keyboard pages, the numbers page, the letters page, and the special characters page. I could not get used to this, it was simply too awkward and way too slow.

My question is, do you think purchasing the Apple Bluetooth keyboard would settle this issue, and is a reasonable compromise? I very much want the iPad for all the other obvious reasons that everybody loves theirs, but am wondering if purchasing the keyboard for travel takes away the portability attraction and if it would then be better to bite the bullet and spend a few hundred more for the Macbook Air 11.6? I would never use the keyboard at home as I use my desktop to work from home and not the iPad, so it would only be when I travel(not that much, perhaps 4 to 5 times a year) Thanks

 

[Satori]

I was going to purchase an iPad, partly for the fun factor and partly for a very portable solution to access my work desktop when I travel via a remote desktop program we use. It worked fine in fooling around with it in an Apple store, with one excpetion. We use the * key a lot in my work, so using the iPad keyboard would now require shuttling back and forth between 3 keyboard pages, the numbers page, the letters page, and the special characters page. I could not get used to this, it was simply too awkward and way too slow.

My question is, do you think purchasing the Apple Bluetooth keyboard would settle this issue, and is a reasonable compromise? I very much want the iPad for all the other obvious reasons that everybody loves theirs, but am wondering if purchasing the keyboard for travel takes away the portability attraction and if it would then be better to bite the bullet and spend a few hundred more for the Macbook Air 11.6? I would never use the keyboard at home as I use my desktop to work from home and not the iPad, so it would only be when I travel(not that much, perhaps 4 to 5 times a year) Thanks

You might want to try something along these lines

There are quite a few variations of this type of case coming onto the market now.

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I recently got the Padacs version of the keyboard case and am really pleased with it: the keys are rubber which took a bit of getting used to but it works really well and folds out of the way nicely when you don't want the keyboard.