I have just purchased a Reveware flexible Bluetooth keyboard for use with my Nokia N8 and forthcoming iPad2. I had real trouble locating a driver to make it work with my Nokia N8 and then discovered that I don’t actually need one. I simply paired it through the Bluetooth menu on my Nokia N8, set a four digit key, which I then typed on the keyboard, and it worked perfectly.
The keyboard is great for touch typing (I have been known to reach 90 words per minute), but there are three niggles:
- It is very fiddly to turn the thing on and off.
- It is not entirely obvious whether the thing is on or off: when turning the keyboard on, the red ‘low battery’ light momentarily illumninates, but there is no feedback when turning it off. The battery is supposed to last a week before needing to be recharged, so perhaps this isn’t a big problem. It certainly hasn’t make me regret my purchase.
- It is not a proper UK keyboard, although it does have a pound (£) sign over the number 4 instead of the number 3. Unfortunately the only way to get the pound sign to work is to set the keyboard to UK in the Nokia N8, but this means that some of the keys don’t map correctly (e.g. you have to press shift-3 to get ‘£’ instead of shift-4 which is what the keyboard shows, and there is no way that I have discovered to enter hash ‘#’).
However, the keyboard is very light, waterproof and can be rolled up, making it highly portable. In my opinion, these factors outweigh the niggles.