Today marked the arrival of my iGo bluetooth folding keyboard, so I thought I'd write a review of it. Naturally, I'm writing the review on the device itself, connected to my Nokia 770 internet tablet. So far, so impressive.

So first things first, the physical item. It clocks in at about 5"x3" when folded, and a touch over 10.5" wide when opened up. It's a quality product and doesn't feel like it will break or behave unduly when under pressure.

The keyboard itself has a very sparse compliment of keys, with everything from numbers to punctuation accessed via a second function key. There are 50 keys in all, if you count both halves of the split spacebar as a single key. The keys themselves are of a good size with decent travel and tactile feedback. In fact, I was surprised how quickly I became accustomed to its unusual layout and slightly boingy feel. Of course, the boinginess is because I have the whole assembly resting on my lap. On a table it's completely sturdy.

The various folding portions have good quality hinges that don't rattle and are not loose. In fact, folding the device up can be a two handed affair to slide the left half to the right as the right half folds over to the left. The support stand for your mobile device is good, too, supporting the bulky N770 solidly allowing use of the touchscreen.

Connecting the keyboard to the N770 was simplicity itself. I installed the bluetooth plugin from maemo.org and simply chose my keyboard from a list of one available device. Once this is done the first time, connection and disconnection happens automagically when you open and close the keyboard.

Overall I am very happy with this keyboard. I'm always a little concerned with small key layouts because some of them have functions like pgup, pgdn, home, end, delete and so on in really weird positions. On this device they're all in the bottom right, mostly accessible via a function key and an arrow key. This is the same as on my macbook, so is easy to get used to.

The only small niggle I have doesn't really concern the keyboard itself. For some reason, there is a large instructional sticker covering half the keyboard and going straight across the face of the closed keyboard and it is nigh impossible to remove. I finally got most of it off using a slightly damp flannel and some scrubbing. I really can't understand the logic of using such permanent glue on the sticker, and it appears that many people share this view.

So there it is, my mini-review of a mini-keyboard. It works well, it's easy to use and clearly of good build quality. It's just that darn sticker ...