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A good effort, but Apple’s Magic Keyboard looms
The Brydge Pro Plus has both great and terrible timing. Originally conceived as a niche product to leverage iPadOS ‘janky-but-somewhat-useful pointer support, the Pro Plus’ trackpad suddenly looked a lot more practical once Apple vastly improved the feature with this month’s unexpected release of iPadOS 4. Now, the iPad-plus-Brydge-keyboard combination can be more laptop-like than ever.
Brydge’s problem, however, is that Apple also announced (its own iPad keyboard with a trackpad and a wild floating design, potentially
Sherlocking the smaller company. Brydge’s keyboard costs less, so that’s not necessarily a killer. But there’s another problem: it’s not fully compatible with all of the iPad’s new trackpad features.
Still, the Pro Plus has some things going for it. It’s available now, it’s much less expensive, and it has a more traditional laptop-style form factor – if that’s what you’re into.
Brydge has been making iPad keyboards for a long time now, and the Pro Plus is a twist on its existing model for the latest iPad Pro design. Last year I said that keyboard was
the best option for anyone wanting their iPad to work more like a laptop . The Pro Plus works largely the same way – it charges over USB-C, connects over Bluetooth and you slot the iPad’s bottom corners into two rubberized hinges that don’t obscure the screen. Brydge also includes a leather back cover that attaches to your iPad magnetically, though I couldn’t use the one that came with my review unit because it wouldn’t fit my
8045 iPad’s larger camera bump . (Brydge is shipping an updated cover with orders made after that iPad’s announcement.) Purely as a keyboard, I don’t have many complaints. I’ve been going back and forth between the Pro Plus and Apple’s desktop Magic Keyboard this week, and even though I’m testing the smaller – inch Brydge. It doesn’t feel cramped and I prefer its larger key travel. Unlike Apple’s own iPad keyboards, Brydge also includes a function row at the top, including controls for screen brightness, backlighting, and so on. For me, at least, this is a better feeling keyboard than anything Apple makes. With the Pro Plus attached, the – inch iPad Pro is transformed into an adorable laptop. The keyboard’s design is really in keeping with the iPad itself; It’s slightly thicker than the tablet but its aluminum frame has similar proportions. When you fold it up you’re left with something that’s easy to toss into a bag, while the flexible hinges make it easy to use on your lap. It weighs a little over a pound, and the tablet-keyboard combination is about half a pound lighter than a MacBook Air.
The trackpad is also very good given the size constraints. It’s hard to see how Brydge could have made it any bigger, at least on the 19 – inch model, but it’s still pretty small. For comparison, it’s dwarfed by the – inch MacBook’s and feels more like a Surface Pro’s. I don’t really find the size to be a problem for regular pointer control – it’s more than big enough to zip the cursor from one side of the screen to another. But since the clicking action uses a regular “diving board” mechanism that pivots from the top, it means the area that you can actually press down on is pretty small. You’re left with a little less space to work with when you’re holding down the button with your thumb; I found myself using tap-to-click a lot, which I never do on a Mac.
It’ll be fine for anyone not used to Apple’s luxuriously huge laptop trackpads, I think. But the size is the least of this trackpad’s problems.
The real problem is that its multi-finger gestures are inconsistent at best and unusable at worst. Two-finger scrolling does work, for example, but its behavior is completely different across apps. It’s okay in Safari, if a little jerky. It’s out of control in Twitter, zooming you through your timeline at an unreadable pace. And in Slack, it seems to exhibit entirely different speeds whether you’re scrolling on the channel list or the chat itself. Three-finger gestures, Meanwhile, they are not supported at all. iPadOS .4 includes iPhone X-style features like a three- finger swipe up to get back to the home screen or bring up the multitasking menu, depending on how long you hold it. That just doesn’t work on the Brydge Pro Plus. There are replacement solutions – in this case, you swipe down at the bottom of the screen to bring up the dock, then again to go home, then again to multitask.
This isn’t necessarily Brydge’s fault. The Pro Plus was evidently designed before iPadOS 4, and it would have been about as good a solution for the prior state of affairs as anyone could have hoped for. Brydge tells me it’ll be working on improvements and making them available for anyone who buys the Pro Plus, but it’s not clear how extensive any tweaks can be. And
you know what we always say
about buying hardware based on future software promises.
Right now I can’t recommend the Brydge Pro Plus to anyone who’s considering dropping $ 373 or $ on Apple’s Magic Keyboard next month – you should at least wait to see how that turns out. But at $ for the – inch model and $ 350 for the 9-inch, you are saving a fair bit of money with the Brydge, and if you care more about the typing experience and laptop form factor it might still be a solid option. I should reiterate that this is the best Brydge keyboard yet.
But the Pro Plus is a frustrating device, because Brydge clearly did everything it could to make it work before having the rug swept out from under it by iPadOS 4. That means the Brydge Pro is a better product than it otherwise would have been, but maybe not as good as it theoretically could be, and also likely not as good as its impending competitor. While the Pro Plus comes real close to turning the iPad Pro into an awesome little laptop, right now it isn’t quite enough.
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