In preparation for a recent flight I bought a portable foldable Bluetooth keyboard to use with my iPhone. It worked great, and fits much better on an airplane keyboard than my normal airplane computing setup (12.9 iPad Pro). Just figured I would share my thoughts.
I’ve got a pop socket on the back of my case which works well as a stand on the tray table. Not sure how well this would work without that. Best application for me using it was Drafts - just a big screen to type on. Also helped that it is the XS Max - so lots of screen real estate to replace other devices and you can fit a good amount of text on it. That said, other apps are clearly better on the iPad (for me Omnifocus on the iPad is a much better experience for doing something like a review or major work). Hitting space to wake up works, and if you hit it twice you can type in password (rather than rotating the phone or my head to get Face ID to work). The keyboard is big enough that it was quick to get used to typing on it, although unsurprisingly not much travel on the keys (compared with my vintage MacBook Air). The fold in the middle isn’t a problem for typing, a few keys are just oddly wide to make them all line up. Downsides: not great for typing compared with a real keyboard, but not a huge surprise and better than I would have guessed. Some features I’m used to with ipad (command-tab, and slide over) don’t work and muscle memory refuses to acknowledge that.
Bonus: it is easy to fit a drink on the tray table with this setup, impossible with the iPad + keyboard.
Overall, for $25 or so, I’m pretty happy with the investment.
I’ll post a link to the one I bought as a comment so if it is against the rules the bot can just take it down and leave the post up.
