Keyboards

The Surface comes with a small and thin external keyboard/screen cover -- one thing that I had kinda wished the iPad had. (You can purchase external keyboard for the iPad, as well as a better one for the Surface.) The Surface's keyboard takes some getting used to because it is so thin. It doesn't have anywhere near the same level of tactile feedback as a regular keyboard. Also, the edges of the keys aren't well-defined, and the usual "bump" on the F and J keys is so small that it's pretty much unnoticeable. As a result, I find that my fingers start to "drift" into the wrong locations.

Still, with just a little bit of usage, I've gotten to the point where it's very usable. I am actually typing this post using it.

I was curious to see what my typing speed was on various keyboards, so I took the typing test at www.learn2type.com on a couple of different keyboards. The results:

• Regular desktop keyboard: 105wpm
• iPod onscreen keyboard: 30wpm
• Surface onscreen keyboard: 30wpm
• Surface external keyboard: 70wpm

So, the external keyboard definitely slows me down, but it is twice as fast as either of the onscreen keyboards. And the onscreen keyboards are equally good, or bad, depending on how you look at it :) (I like the Surface onscreen keyboard slightly better because the underscore key, which I use in a lot of my online usernames and passwords, is right on the numbers/symbols keyboard. On the iPad onscreen keyboard, it is on the second level of the numbers/symbols keyboard -- basically, one more tap away.)

I also find that autocorrect is much "smarter" on the Surface (and on my Windows 7 phone). I've always wondered how my online contacts sometimes manage to mangle their messages so badly... after a few weeks of using the iPad, now I know. Autocorrect often changes what I typed to something completely different. My Microsoft devices seem to err on the side of not correcting what I typed, and just flagging it as being misspelled. When it does auto-correct, it is almost always right on.

So, advantage: Surface when it comes to writing on a tablet.