Similarities and differences

While Type2Phone stays connected for some time even if you leave the application, Typeeto disconnects from the devices as soon as you switch away from it. It is hard to say if that is a good or bad thing.

Apple iOS devices hide the on screen keyboard as long as a bluetooth keyboard is connected. With Type2Phone, the keyboard stays hidden for some time until the application disconnects. During that time you can not use the on screen keyboard unless you explicitly disconnect the application from the device. With Typeeto you don’t have to do this as it disconnects as soon as you switch to another application. The downside of this approach is the connect time. Switching a lot between Mac applications and Typeeto causes a lot of connects and disconnects – and the connect takes a couple of seconds each time.

In comparison, Typeeto shows a very neat UI providing only the details needed. Sadly, it misses a few features I really like in some of the others. While writing, I missed the possibility to navigate text quickly as it is a bit more challenging as Typeeto does not yet support all the keyboard features.

Select text with the keyboard
Typeeto allows to use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C and CMD+V to copy and paste text. Sadly selecting text with the keyboard by holding the Shift key and navigating with the cursor keys is not yet supported.

Jump to the beginning / end of a line / word by word
Navigating text can be painful without navigation shortcuts like jumping to the start or the end of a line. The same for jumping the cursor word-by-word. All those shortcuts are standard behaviour of a mac and would be possible on mobile devices as well. Sadly those shortcuts are not yet supported by Typeeto.

Even if Typeeto is not supporting all the features provided by other solutions, it surprises in other features.

Copy/paste from the Mac to the device
The approach for copy/paste across devices is great. While others provide a way to copy text from the Mac to the device as well, they force you to interact with the UI in some way. Typeeto allows you to configure a separate keyboard shortcut to paste the Mac’s clipboard to the connected device. With this shortcut set, you can keep your hands on the keyboard while you copy text between your Mac and the connected device.

All those features are supported by iOS Apps and work through Type2Phone. Sadly they do not work yet via Typeeto. Those are features you only notice missing if you use Typeeto to edit bigger pieces of text.

All in all, a very neat application which works great as a bluetooth keyboard. And even if it misses a few features, it has great potential.