Hasta La Gadget!

Problem: The iPad keyboard, especially in landscape mode, is a little to big for thumb-typing. Lay it on your lap and you’re fine, but if you’re standing, or lying in bed with your iPad above you, you’re out of luck.

Solution: A $1 app called Keyboard Upgrade. Fire it up and you are presented with a blank white screen, the standard iPad keyboard and a few icons. The trick is that you can move the keyboard around, resizing it, splitting it into two parts and even rotating those parts to a more comfortable position. You could, for example, split the keyboard in two, relocate each half to a bottom corner and rotate slightly for easy thumb-access.

It won’t replace the keyboard in any of your other applications, as apps in the iPhone OS aren’t allowed to mess with each other like that, but you can type text to share anywhere else via copy-and-paste. It’s a little kludgy, but at the same time fantastically inventive, and for bashing out long-form text it is sure a lot lighter to carry around than an external keyboard. Available in the App Store now.

Keyboard Upgrade [iTunes via Macworld]