Brydge Keyboard 7.9 — Transform your iPad Mini
Most of us dream of a device that is small, powerful, and functional. Something that is the in between of your home computer and your phone. For some people, that device is a tablet, others, a small laptop. Apple has tried to solve this with the iPad Pro and iPad Pro 9.7. What if you want something smaller? An iPad Mini would be your solution, but to make a device truly powerful a keyboard is a necessity. I went on a hunt to find the best keyboard for the iPad Mini and I think I found it, the Brydge 7.9.
The Brydge 7.9 is from Brydge, a now well-known maker of keyboards for the iPad since 2014. I was always interested in their products, but until recently I never had a need for a keyboard on my iPad. When I realized that I had a need for it, I decided to reach out to them for a review unit.
After about a month and a half of testing, using it daily, I have to say that it is pretty awesome. I have always wanted a laptop that is small enough to bring with me everywhere, for those moments of inspirational writing or note taking. Even when I am not using it for writing, having the keyboard makes navigating and using the iPad that much more productive.
The best part of the Brydge 7.9 is the build quality. I feel like I am truly carrying around a mini MacBook. It is fully constructed out of aluminum, only having plastic on the keys themselves. The hinges and buttons are even metal. The color is not an exact match to my Space Gray iPad, but considering that Apple cannot even keep that color consistent between its own products, its pretty damn close. The build is so nice that you would think that Apple themselves made it. The hinges feel quite stiff at first, but once the iPad is mounted it feels perfect. One thing that is needed to bring up, the instructions say to tighten the mounts to your desired grip, but do this carefully. I decided to tighten mine so that my iPad wouldn’t budge much, but when I wanted to take my iPad out for reading it was nearly impossible to remove. I remedied this by putting a pair of needle nose pliers in the mouth and spreading them to stretch it a bit.
Sure it’s pretty and feels top notch, but how does it work?
Starting with the pairing process, the experience is great. It only takes a few moments to pair the keyboard. Once paired, you can immediately start typing. Apple has made the keyboard experience much better with iOS 9, with the addition of the predictive text bar and the copy/paste tools on the screen. The key throw is decent enough for a keyboard of its thickness, and most keys are large enough. My only real grudge with key spacing is the enter key and number 1 key. Yes the keyboard is much smaller than a normal keyboard, but considering the iPad is only 8”, you get a decent space to work with. I did hours of writing and using social media on the Brydge 7.9 and it performed much better than expected. There is even dedicated numbers and symbols rows. The battery was amazing, I haven’t had a need to charge it the entire month and a half I have been using it.
The only area in which the Brydge 7.9 truly fell short was using the “command + tab” feature that is built into the iPad’s keyboard support features. When iOS 9 launched and greater keyboard support was flashed as a fancy feature, power users like myself were shocked that Apple brought one of the most used multitasking features from OS X to iOS. On a Mac, all you have to do is press “command + tab” to cycle through your open applications. I use this feature every few minutes on my Mac and I was looking forward to using it on my iPad Mini. This feature is there, but the Tab key is not mapped to tab by default, it is mapped to caps lock. So in order to use this function, the user must press “fn + command + tab”. On a normal keyboard, this function is tough but fairly easy, once acclimated to it. On the Brydge all of these keys are located on the left side of the keyboard, which means you have to get your hand into a very contorted shape to pull it off. Sure, you can probably get used to it, but I never did after my prolonged testing. I would instead press the home button twice to bring up the normal iOS multitasker.
The Brydge 7.9 almost checks all the boxes for me when it comes to a keyboard for my iPad. If it had the keys mapped a little more naturally it would be a perfect keyboard in my opinion. If you don’t care about that little issue, there is no better keyboard for an iPad that I have yet to run across. Brydge also makes this keyboard for other iPad models, so if you want to convert your iPad into a MacBook, Brydge has you covered.
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Originally published at mindhungry.com on July 24, 2016.
