Today I was sitting in my car reading my iPad when I went to the browser search box and was surprised to see the keyboard didn’t appear.  I rotated the iPad and still, no keyboard.  I opened the notepad, my backup Opera browser, mail and even my contact file.  Nothing.  Very strange.

What’s the first thing you do when you have a problem with a device?  You Google it.  Unfortunately, that is really hard when you can’t type anything.  I was stuck with a problem that had to be fixed before I could find out how to solve it.

Enter Google’s iPad app.  This handy app, which many people don’t know about, features speech to text conversion, kind of a nice way of having a little Siri before Apple releases it on the iPad 3 and charges us another $599 to use it.  I spoke into the device “My iPad keyboard stopped working”.  Lo and behold – a lot of hits came up.

It turns out that it is very hard to type on Apple’s mobile devices.  I also have an iPhone and have to constantly use the magnifying glass editing tool to fix my mistyping.  Having just switched from a Blackberry, I miss the tactile keyboard.

My mother got me a Bluetooth external keyboard for Xmas for my iPad (no – you can’t have my Mom), and I just started using it.  Little did I know that with the keyboard in the laptop bag behind my seat, it automatically associated with the iPad, blocking the keyboard.  The fix was to turn off the Bluetooth.  Problem solved.

Thanks Google!