On the Friday night that started a holiday weekend, I found myself helping to troubleshoot an application outage that had come up about unexpectedly. It was an interesting start to the weekend and I am thankful for the technical acumen of my coworkers (near and far) for helping us to get through the crisis. Afterward, it was slightly past my normal bedtime, but having been keyed up by the night’s events, I felt there were miles to go before sleep.
As I sat in bed, my mind refusing to disengage from the day’s events, I knew I couldn’t just lie down and nod off. I broke my usual rule of not engaging in screen time at that late of an hour. I opened up my iPad to continue a blog post I had started about not being able to conform to today’s political packages. Unfortunately for my writing aspirations, my wife and youngest son were asleep, the little guy having indulged in his Friday ritual of spending the night in a sleeping bag on our bedroom floor. As I tried writing in the dark confines of the room, I found my typing failing me, whole thoughts being lost to the chaos of poking at random keys. Then I remembered, my new Brydge keyboard has backlit keys. I couldn’t see which button was the right one to turn the feature on, so I fumbled through a number of them, at one point accidentally breaking the quiet of the night by turning on “Invincible Light” by TW Walsh, which elicited a groan from my dozing wife. After several misfires, I found the right button and turned the backlight on. It was perfect for the moment and got me writing again.
My wife loves her iPad Brydge keyboard. After my iPad Smart Keyboard appeared to be not-so-smart after all and stopped working, I had to throw it away, and look for something new. My wife had been almost taunting me with the reliability of her keyboard and when I saw the older iPad Pro generation keyboards on sale at Brydge, I snapped the one for my model up at a cool one hundred bones. The keyboard has been a fantastic purchase and its build quality matches that of the Apple hardware. I use the word “hardware” very intentionally, as the floppy foldable keyboards from Apple, be they ever so “smart” or “magic” don’t seem to have that same level of quality.
Here are some things that I can do now with my Brydge keyboard that I could not do with the Apple Smart Keyboard:
- Sit in my bed or on my couch, without my lap desk and type out an email or blog post.
- As previously mentioned, type in a room with the lights out, when everyone else is sleeping.
I’m really happy with the Brydge keyboard and, in the lingua franca of marketing and net promoter scores, would highly recommend to a friend.
