My Ultimate Keyboard Folio for the iPad Air arrived on Thursday, and I decided to "test drive" it a couple days before giving my impressions.
I love it! The construction is very nice and definitely sturdy. The "back" that holds the iPad Air is thick and hard plastic. Lots of protection there. The keyboard is very thin and the keys are nice to type on- though the only problem I have had so far is missing the space bar on a fairly consistent basis. I'm getting better though...
The pairing happened automatically. I didn't have to do anything but put my iPad into the case and set an angle. It immediately paired itself.
I purchased the silver case, as it matched the back of my White iPad. It might get dirtier faster than the darker case, but I like the fact that it looks almost like it was straight from Apple. The keys are low, decently spaced for a 5 rowed keyboard, and have a soft-but tactile feel when striking them. The keys themselves are hard plastic. I believe this was for the weight consideration, as rubber keys would have weighed just a little more.
Speaking of weight, the case by itself falls shy of a pound, which means that with the iPad Air installed, its just shy of 2 pounds. Yes, a definitely increase in weight, but still less than a lot of folio cases out there.
So far the only issue I have had is that the battery didn't seem to make it through the day on Friday. For a device that touts having at least 160 hours of use and 1440 of standby, I should not have had any problems, but I did.
I guess that leads to a secondary issue. There is no battery meter or indicator other than the one for charging. When you start charging, the indicator is orange,yellow. The paperwork says it will shine blue when complete, but even after 8 hours of charging, I have yet to see any type of indicator when complete. Charging should take less than the initial 2.5 hours you use for the first charge, so it might be a problem with this particular case being defective. I will be doing another test on Monday to see if I have the same problem again. I use my iPad a LOT at work. Almost more than my laptop, because I use it to remote my Laptop when away from my desk. Its far easier to walk around with this under my arm, and it performs a LOT faster. Every time I have to wake my laptop, I'm "stuck" for 5-10 minutes waiting for it to get to the screen. With this, I can leave my laptop up and active, and RDP into it and do what I need to do. I'm pushing for work to consider giving us ipads to use around the building. Maybe next year.
So, in conclusion, I highly recommend this case. If you are not too particular with the keyboard ( I know some people have a problem with some of the layout for the keys) then I am quite sure you will enjoy using this folio case.
In fact, I typed this review on the case, and had very few errors.
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