How to use keyboard/stand without mouse?

[Julien]

Can you use a Blue Tooth Mouse with the keyboard? If not how do you do touch gestures with it in the stand? It seems like this would be awkward and destabilizing to reach up and push on the screen for all gestures needed.

 

[stridemat]

The apple website does not mention the use of a bluetooth mouse being compatible. We will have to wait for some more hands on reviews.

 

[mkrishnan]

Can you use a Blue Tooth Mouse with the keyboard? If not how do you do touch gestures with it in the stand? It seems like this would be awkward and destabilizing to reach up and push on the screen for all gestures needed.

It looks like the stand has a shoulder behind it to support the iPad. Hopefully, it was designed with this in mind. On the balance, too, it's a capacitive touch screen -- it doesn't take pressure to make it work. One needn't push it hard. People are reporting so far that there is no mouse support... since there isn't a pointer in the interface, this would rather make sense.

I think we'll have to wait for hands-ons with the stand to see if it's been well designed.

 

[4DThinker]

I can use bluetooth keyboards and mice with my Archos 9 tablet. Tested it just to make sure. It turns the 9 into a netbook though, and defeats every advantage it was supposed to have. The same will be true for the iPad. I'm 100% positive that the keyboard dock only exists so the iLife team would stop complaining how pointless their apps were on a Touchscreen-only device. Apple's multitouch Mouse might work with it and the USB adapter. Someone should try.

 

[agkm800]

I don't think Steve Jobs would allow a mouse pointer on his precious multi-touch screen.

 

[MacBass]

I also was wondering if the keyboard dock will work with iPhone/iPod Touch, or if Apple is going to hardware lock it so it will only work with the iPad - a la video out cable for the iPod Classic/iPod Touch/etc.

 

[Luke Redpath]

People wanting to know if they can use a mouse with a touchscreen device...the mind boggles.

 

[MTI]

Apparently the iPad keyboard dock has iPad specific function keys. While Apple has confirmed that their current BT wireless keyboards will work with the iPad, there's been no mention of any mouse or pointer support. Unless the apps are tweaked to accept mouse input, it seems rather doubtful.

 

[wingnut8]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

No way it will support a mouse.

 

[JonboyDC]

there's been no mention of any mouse or pointer support

It supports a number of pointers -- the ones at the end of your hand.

 

[Julien]

People wanting to know if they can use a mouse with a touchscreen device...the mind boggles.

If you are using the keyboard dock you will have to reach up to the screen continuously. Also when need to do a touch gesture (or double), especially towards the top of the screen it looks like this could easily rock or tip over. While I love touch gestures (and even the virtual keyboard) if I have it set up like a desktop/laptop with the "real" keyboard it just seems more natural to use a mouse, pad or track ball on or next to the keyboard than reaching up to the screen. When using in your lap or on a table you reach down for the gestures (not up).

If you have an iPhone cradle put it in and try to do 2 finger gesture and you will see it will tip over and it's hard to coordinate.