Fourth Version, LLC

Being the sole Apple fanboy in my family has made purchasing birthday presents for me pretty simple. I have come to accept the fact that my family is going to put forth as little effort as possible when purchasing gifts for me. For any occasion I can bank on getting one or more Apple gift cards from my loved ones.

These gift cards tend to be the catalyst for instant gratification purchases when I walk into an Apple Store. If I think something is cool, I’ll usually try to justify the purchase by going into my wallet to see how many gift cards I have left, and then convince myself that I’m actually getting said cool device for a “fraction” of the actual cost (I know I know, pathetic).

I was recently in the Apple Store waiting on the Genius Bar and had the iPad Keyboard dock catch my eye. Weeks before I had a few gift cards to burn which yielded the Apple Wireless Keyboard. I have grown to absolutely love the keyboard and have started to swear buy it when not at work. (At work I used a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard which makes sense because I solely use Windows machines at work.) The iPad Keyboard Dock is an all-in-one dock that has one of these keyboards attached to it, so I figured I’d roll the dice as I already knew I liked the keyboard.

My first impression of the dock is that it’s the perfect mesh of Apple’s current line of dock’s with their keyboard. The iPad sits perfectly in the dock in portrait mode. The back of the dock has a place to plug in the 32-pin connector so you can both charge and sync your iPad when you plug it in. They keyboard nearly has the exact same function key layout as the Apple wireless keyboard except for the first few keys which have been modified to include functions that are relevant to the iPad (i.e. keys for the home button). All-in-all it’s a great companion for the iPad. I could really see using it as a dedicated email/twitter/IM/iPod companion while working at my desk.

Now of course its not all roses and rainbows. It can definitely be improved upon, and we can start with the orientation lockdown. I understand that creating a dock that can handle both landscape and portrait orientations is a hard nut to crack, but it would be nice to be able to handle both orientations and thus maximize the screen real estate. Also, and I know I might be missing the point here, but you STILL have to do a ton of touching on the iPad. This is a developer’s nightmare to be honest with you. When I’m doing work, I hardly EVER use my mouse. Keyboard shortcuts are heavily in use and while I know the iPad is not that type of machine….well…IT IS that type of machine. Let me explain.

Let’s take the application that most users use on their iPad: Mail. When I have Mail up on my iPad I really want to be able to look over and peruse my emails, and perform a keyboard shortcut to create a new email, or reply to the current email I have up. Unfortunately, I can’t do that right now with the keyboard. I have to physically touch a button to make it happen. FAIL in my book. Attaching the iPad to a keyboard instantly makes it a super productivity app, and the loss of keyboard shortcut is equivalent to a loss in productivity in my book. Fix those two issues and I’m an extremely happy camper.

I can honestly recommend the iPad + Keyboard Dock for those that are looking for a way to up their productivity with their iPad. I think Bloggers, and super emailers/twitterers/IMer’s stand to get the most out of it. Also, I think in the future Apple will warm up to their product even more and make it available (more) to developers to start to add in those keyboard shortcuts that we developers love so much. So round up your gift cards and head on down to the Apple Store and pick yourself up one. You wont’ regret it.