The raspberry pi keyboard is small and compact, perfect for traveling with if you have a phone or tablet but want a physical qwerty keyboard that you can connect with a cable. The cable connection saves significant battery power compared to Bluetooth keyboards. The key spacing of the keyboard is reasonable, but it does feel somewhat cheap when compared to premium keyboards like he MX keys. It’s got a very plasticy feel to it and there’s some sloppy key movement which might put off some more professional typists. For small pieces of work or ones that don’t require significant speed it is tenable as a keyboard, but if you’re in it for typing speed and accuracy there’s just something about it that seems to slow you down.
The keyboard itself requires a reasonable amount of force to trigger key presses and it makes quite a lot of noise for a low profile keyboard. I was quite surprised by this and I’m not sure what about the mechanics and construction make it work in this way. Coming from an IBM model M you might feel quite at home with the stompy key presses but from something like the MX Keys as a more modern low profile example I would say my preferences lead towards the more premium keyboard. You can soft type with the keyboard but something about it, either the construction quality or key travel distance really makes me want to hard-press instead of gently touch each key.
The integrated USB hub makes the device slightly more interesting than most run of the mill keyboards. It has been quite useful when the keyboard is setup on a desktop PC or with a laptop with few USB ports It’s allowed quick insertion of USB drives and even the wireless dongle for my mouse. I would not say it is a killer feature though.
I’ve been able to use the Pi keyboard, using a micro-USB to USB-C shim with both my phone (Google Pixel) and tablet (Samsung s6 lite). It has worked well with Google Docs in particular, although the keyboard did need changed from English US to English GB layout to work with quote marks, etc.
Overall I’d rate the Raspberry pi keyboard with half marks, 5 out of 10. It’s not unpleasant to work on and entirely serviceable but it does leave me longing for a better keyboard when writing longer pieces and it does get a little bit tiring to type on with the key stomp. Good for it’s price range but nothing to write home about.