Back on August 16th I wrote a blog post entitled A better blog editor, in which I wrote that when I recklessly said I would be operating this blog from my iPhone, I hadn’t realised what I was letting myself in for.

One of the main problems is having to type with thick adult fingers on the cramped little keyboard of my iPhone. Used to typing quickly on a computer, I find myself reduced to a snail’s pace on the phone, backspacing again and again over errors to the accompaniment of language inappropriate to polite society.

Ta-da! Tigger today presented me with this Bluetooth keyboard as a present for my birthday.

It measures about 20 cm X 12.5 cm (7.9 in X 5 in). It is very thin but has a metal back plate which strengthens it somewhat. It came in a red imitation leather case which also has three anchor points designed to hold the phone in landscape position. There is no maker’s name and no manual, not so much as a pamphlet explaining the layout of the keyboard.

The letters are set out in the standard QWERTY configuration and many other characters can be typed by finding the keys on which they are inscribed though it is not always obvious whether you access them using the Shift, Ctrl or Alt keys. You learn this by trial and error

For example, you may be able to see from the photo that the single quote/apostrophe is on the key with the letter ‘o’, but how do you access it? It turns out that you type it by pressing Fn + ‘O’.

However, the real fun starts with the top row of keys. These are of course the 12 function keys plus Esc on the left. But wait, each key has inscribed on it the function key number plus three other characters. You access these by pressing the keys in combination with Shift, Ctrl or Alt but you have to learn by trial and error which of these to use. And that’s not all: you sometimes get a character that isn’t even marked on the key! For example, looking at the keys, you would assume that Shift + F3 would produce #. It doesn’t: it produces £! For #, you type Alt + F3! What if want the euro symbol,€? Can you find it on the keyboard? No? Well, you type Alt + F2, something I discovered by accident.

Typing text is definitely faster with the keyboard and causes less swearing 🙂 On the other hand, editing and inserting photos still requires me to handle the phone so I will have work a way of combining the two sorts of actions, especially when working “on the road”, for example sitting in a cafe.

I can foresee lots of fun ahead!