Logitech Combo Touch review

I have been using the iPad as my main personal computer for years. As an iOS software engineer, I still need to use a Mac for work. Work-life balance has always been important to me, so I used to have a separate work desk and ‘personal stuff’ desk, in separate areas of my home, with a separate Mac on each. But after the iPad came out, I eventually got rid of the personal desk. My entire home is now my personal area, and I would never go back. I feel that even a laptop cannot match the convenience of being able to pick up an iPad, use it for a moment, and then put it aside. For many people, this translates into a preference for the phone as the primary computing device. But for me, as long as I’m at home, I prefer the larger screen of the iPad compared to my iPhone. I rarely use my iPhone except when I am away from home.

Up until this point, I have shunned keyboard cases. It was a mystery to me why would anyone would want to make the iPad into a worse version of a laptop, instead of just buying a real laptop. The worst part about it, in my view, was the necessity of awkwardly moving one’s hands back and forth between the keyboard and the touchscreen. It felt extremely awkward and unpleasant to me, not only because the touch screen is far apart from the keyboard, but also because it is at an entirely different angle.

Besides, I have never felt like a hardware keyboard was a necessity for the iPad. I am quite happy typing on the touchscreen in landscape mode, starting on the home row and using all 10 fingers. I wouldn’t say I’m as fast or accurate as I am with a hardware keyboard, but I am faster and more accurate than I am on the iPhone.

Even so, there are times when I still need to do ‘laptop-y’ stuff: Sometimes, this means using old web apps from big institutions that are not touchscreen-friendly. Sometimes, this means doing data-heavy tasks like working with spreadsheets, or writing long essays like this one. These kinds of tasks are more time-consuming and more suited to precise, specialised tools like a mouse and keyboard.

The Logitech Combo Touch feels close to the perfect solution to me: There is no more need to move my hands back and forth between touchscreen and keyboard, because of the built-in trackpad. Even better, it works with the iPad I already own (an iPad Pro 10.5”, circa 2017). On the Mac, I always use a trackpad, never a mouse; so this product was easy for me to adapt to.

Most importantly, the Combo Touch doesn’t take anything away from the iPad’s nature as an iPad, so that I can ignore the keyboard and trackpad when I don’t need it — which is most of the time.

The most immediately noticeable thing about the device is how much weight it adds: a LOT. It instantly transformed my still-futuristic-feeling (despite being 3 years old) iPad into something that feels more like I’m carrying around a clunky old-school laptop. This is probably the biggest tradeoff.

As a case, though, it is pretty nice. The grey cross-hatch pattern is nice to look at, and it has a soft fabric feel to it. So if you’re going to wrap your iPad in a giant outer shell, I suppose you could do worse.

The keys are a bit smaller than I am used to, by necessity. But it didn’t take long for me to adjust, and I already feel like I am just about as accurate in typing on it as with my Mac keyboards.

I really appreciate the top row of shortcut keys (which can adjust brightness, play/pause, change volume, etc.) as well as the home button (where you would normally find ‘escape’). It’s a mystery to me why the more expensive Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad does not have these. I need to emphasise this point, because it’s actually a big enough deal for me right now that, I think, all on its own, this one single issue would prevent me from ever considering an Apple Magic Keyboard, and also therefore any model iPad for which a keyboard with shortcut keys and a trackpad is not available. Yes, it’s that important to me. (I really, really, really hate using the iPad’s built-in volume buttons to control the volume. And the vast majority of video player apps inexplicably have no software volume control.)

The keys feel good. It’s hard for me to qualify that statement any further: I mostly don’t notice that it’s different from any other keyboard I’m used to. I suppose that’s a good thing. I am not a person who tends to have strong opinions about key travel and things like that.

The trackpad is also a bit smaller than I am used to, again by necessity. It is just about as big as it could reasonably be, given the constraints of the size of the iPad itself. This has also been a bit difficult for me to adjust to, but it’s hard to see how it could be improved on because there is simply no more space available to it. Touching it feels good, like a Mac trackpad. I own other Logitech trackpads and this is far superior to any of them; it feels much more like an Apple product than a Logitech product. I am not sure if it has a glass covering, or high-quality plastic; the fact that I can’t tell the difference speaks well of it. It is a ‘diving board’ style trackpad, meaning it can only register a click when you press approximately the bottom half of it. (Alternatively, you can turn on ‘tap to click’, which is off by default, in Settings. However, if you do so, you are a monster. Nothing personal, it’s just that the very notion of ‘tap to click’ is an abomination.)

One thing I was curious about was what would happen if the keyboard was folded over the back of the iPad, in order to use it in ‘tablet mode’: would it be smart enough to automatically disable the keys, to avoid inadvertent key presses and cursor movement? As it turns out, it’s not even possible to use it this way. The magnetic connection of the keyboard to the iPad is not strong enough for it to stay connected when you fold it even a little bit backwards. It is clearly designed with the idea that you will detach the keyboard every time you are not using it. I expect that this will be a bit inconvenient when I am sitting on the couch, which is when I will frequently not want to use the keyboard, and will therefore need to find some nearby place to temporarily store it. For me, this is probably the biggest downside of the device.

One thing I miss, coming from a Mac, are an escape key and a forward-delete key. Even on Mac keyboards without a dedicated forward-delete key, this can be performed with fn-delete. However, the Combo Touch does not have an fn key. I haven’t found an alternative yet. The Combo Touch also does not have an escape key, but alternatives are available (see Tips section below).

Surprisingly (to me), I really like the kickstand. It does not have any discrete stopping points, so it can be adjusted to any angle within its range of motion. Even when the keyboad is detached, I find that I prefer the kickstand over the Apple Smart Cover that I was using before. The kickstand makes it so easy to switch between a video-viewing angle and a typing-onscreen angle, or anything in between, without any screen rotation. I wonder how durable it will be over a long period of time, but I hope that its considerable weight is an indication that it is made with sturdy materials, although this is only speculation. Friends, we Apple-using folk made fun of other tablets’ kickstands for years, and I am here to tell you now: we were wrong.

Soon after I first started using the Combo Touch, I started noticed issues with it spontaneously disconnecting from the iPad. The keyboard backlight would suddenly power off (which is different from its power save mode, which gradually fades out the backlight over several seconds). During the few seconds that it was off, keyboard and trackpad input would be lost. This is obviously frustrating in many situations, such as when in mid-sentence or mid-scroll.

I tried cleaning the smart connector contacts on both ends with rubbing alcohol. I also tried rebooting the iPad. Neither improved the situation.

I wrote to Logitech’s support for advice, and provided specific details about the problem, but I only received generic form-letter responses before I decided not to proceed further down that avenue. I understand that they are busier than normal, due to the current global situation.

I returned the first unit to Apple and ordered a second unit. So far, I have not experienced this problem with the second unit.

The iOS Settings app has settings for both the keyboard and trackpad as well, under general. This is part of the new native support for trackpad and mouse in iOS 13.4, which is very nice, for the most part. But I’ll refrain from getting into very many of those details here, as I think that information is adequately covered in many places elsewhere on the internet. However, I do have a few notes on things that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere.

I was confused at first about the ‘two finger secondary click’ setting, which enables functionality that is supposed to bring up a contextual menu. The setting was on by default, but even after toggling it off and then on again, I could not get any contextual menus to appear by doing a two-finger click the same way that I do on a Mac. I eventually figured it out, though. I grew up with older trackpads that used to have a separate ‘click’ button, below the touch surface. So the way that I naturally use a trackpad is by moving my index finger around near the top half, and clicking with my thumb on the bottom half. To be clear, this works perfectly with the Combo Touch. But to do a ‘two finger’ click, I am used to placing my middle finger on the trackpad as well as the index, and then clicking with the thumb — technically, a total of three fingers. This works on a Mac, but does not work with this product. Instead, I have to use only two fingers, and place them towards the lower half of the trackpad (because this is a diving-board style mechanism, it is difficult to click in the top half). This is an awkward procedure for me personally, but it is better than nothing.

I have seen some strange and annoying scrolling behavior in certain apps. In Safari and News, specifically, my attempts to scroll seem to be randomly ignored (the cursor moves instead, despite having two fingers on the trackpad). This does not happen in other built-in apps, and also does not happen in any third-party apps that I have tried so far. At first I thought it was related to my previously-mentioned hardware defect, but: it only occurs in those two apps (so far), it is fixed immediately when switching to another app, and the keyboard backlight stays on the entire time. So I think it is a software issue, and I hope it is fixed in a future iOS version.

In the base iOS user interface, and in most or all of Apple’s built-in apps, it seems that any gesture that can be performed with the touchscreen can also be perfomed using the trackpad. A single-finger gesture on the the touchscreen translates into a two-finger gesture on the trackpad. This makes intuitive sense, since a single-finger gesture on the trackpad is always reserved for moving the cursor; just add one finger to change the behavior. But… so far, this trick tends to only work with the built-in apps, not third-party apps. I believe this is the result of new trackpad APIs in iOS 13.4 which the developers need to individually add support for in each of their own apps. In apps where this isn’t implemented, there is simply no way to perform most gestures on the trackpad. As with most new features on iOS, the best ones (bespoke RSS readers, artisanal coffee grinding calculators, etc.) will likely implement this functionality within the coming days or weeks, and the worst ones (retailers, banks, cellular providers, anything made with React Native) will likely implement it never.

For the apps that don’t have trackpad gesture support, it may be worth looking into which keyboard shortcuts they may have already implemented, since the keyboard API has been around for a much longer time than the trackpad API. This is easy to discover in most apps just by holding the command key for a few seconds, which displays a list of all currently available shortcuts. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be much of a standard for which keys do what, so you may find that these vary depending on which app you’re in. There also isn’t much of a standard for which hardware keys your keyboard might have, resulting in some apps providing multiple redundant shortcuts for the same functionality (for example, your keyboard may or may not have an escape key; the Combo Touch does not). Finally, the available shortcuts can change even within a single app, depending on whether the app uses certain APIs, most notably SFSafariViewController. In this specific case, the only apparent keyboard shortcut to back out of the screen is Command-W, which may be different than the ‘back’ shortcut that the app uses on its other screens. Unlike Android, iOS does not have the concept of a universal back button, and this extends to keyboard use as well. So in order to repeatedly go back through several screens in an app, if one of them is a web view, you may find yourself needing to switch between several different keyboard shortcuts. This is not ideal, to say the least, and trips me up rather frequently.

A small — but persistent — gripe that I have with many apps (including Apple’s own apps like Messages) is that even when the primary purpose of the app is typing, it is not immediately ready to accept keyboard input as soon as I open it. The Mac equivalents of these apps generally do not have this problem. But on the iPad, I need to move the cursor over to the text field and click it, every time I open the app. This makes sense for a touchscreen interface, but with a trackpad and keyboard, it feels needlessly laborious. I wish these apps were clever enough to notice when I have a keyboard connected and focus the text field automatically.

In the end, if I want a keyboard and trackpad combination device that can attach to my current iPad via the smart connector, then the Logitech Combo Touch is the only choice available. At time of writing, there simply are no others that meet these requirements. Maybe it is because trackpad support on the iPad is so new, or maybe it is due to Apple’s licensing requirements for the smart connector. Maybe it is some combination of both. Only Apple know for sure. But after reading about the problems with the Brydge trackpad, as well as my own negative experiences with Bluetooth devices, I would never choose a Bluetooth trackpad. So for me, it’s this or nothing. Given that choice, I’m pretty happy with the product overall.

You can buy the Logitech Combo Touch keyboard and trackpad from Apple’s web site in two versions:

If you have an iPad Pro 11” or 12.9” (3rd or 4th generation), Logitech doesn’t make a version of this product for those. You can consider Apple’s Magic Keyboard instead, although it lacks shortcut keys (no I will not be quiet about this).

If you have an iPad Pro 12.9” (1st or 2nd generation), neither Apple nor Logitech makes a product like this — a keyboard and trackpad combination that uses the smart connector — so you are out of luck. You can look into Bluetooth alternatives.

I purchased these products with personal funds. I was not compensated for writing this or for linking to any products for sale.

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