About eight years ago, I didn’t have an iPad or an iPhone, I had a Dell Axim X5, Dell’s woefully ugly entry into the Pocket PC market. I loved the thing, especially in conjunction with a wonderful accessory that allowed me to collapse a roughly netbook-sized keyboard into the space of a small pocket notebook.
I’m sort of amused, then, to see Logitech dusting off this old approach to mobile keyboards with their new Logitech Fold-Up Keyboard for iPad, but it’s almost like they were taking stupid pills when they were designing it.
The big problem here is that instead of just releasing a tiny fold-out Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad that you could just tuck into your bag, Logitech tried to make it part of a case. The result is an iPad that looks approximately three or four times as thick with Logitech’s Fold-Up Keyboard attached as it is without it.
Then there’s the price. $129.99? Uh, no. I’d rather get their other keyboard case, which is $30 cheaper. I’ll pass. How about you?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
