BrydgeAir for iPad Air/Air 2

Following in the footsteps of the Brydge+ for iPad, the Brydge Air has been designed with the iPad Air in mind. You can’t ruin the slim form factor of the iPad Air with a chunky, ugly case right? Thankfully that’s not true with the Brydge Air – instead of taking away some of the elegance of the iPad, it adds to the experience and transforms your tablet into a MacBook look-alike.

As with many iPad keyboards, the keys have been reduced in size. Usually this means that inaccuracies start to appear in your typing, but with the BrydgeAir it wasn’t the case.

We found no real adjustment period and typing speeds were close to what we achieve with a normal sized keyboard. There are only two real issues for UK users – there’s a $ button but no £ button ,and the Enter key is only one row wide when usually its two.

There’s no real surprise that it’s constructed from aluminium because it’s clear that Brydge wanted a keyboard that looked like it belonged with your (Aluminium backed) iPad Air. The keys are black, made of plastic and feel great to type on. A new addition from the older generation Brydge keyboard is a backlight keyboard much like the MacBook Air. While some may think of this as a novelty that drains battery life, it enables you to type more comfortably in low light.

It’s designed so that your iPad slots into the hinges simply and easily and is held in place thanks to the friction caused by rubber inserts. It also comes with shims that fit into the hinges, to be used with the even thinner iPad Air 2.

We were particularly impressed by the viewing angles as you can tilt the iPad back to almost 180 degrees. This means that you can get a comfortable angle to work with.

When you’re done, you just close it as you would a normal laptop and the magnets built into the BrydgeAir turn off your iPad.

In the previous generation of the Brydge keyboards, you had to pay extra to get built in speakers but with the BrydgeAir, they come as standard. While the original speakers were set just above the keyboard, facing you, on the BrydgeAir they’ve moved to the back, just underneath where your iPad sits. While this made no sense to us on first glance, during testing we still had satisfactory results with the speakers. They’re not the greatest speakers in the world with a lack of bass, but they definitely contribute to the laptop illusion.

Verdict

The BrydgeAir is a great for people that don’t want to carry both an iPad and a laptop.