Jason Snell, writing on Six Colors:

Last week I was writing a story on a warm, summery day—rare for early April, even in sunny California—and I was despairing about being inside rather than in my backyard. I ended up sitting out in the backyard and writing the story on my iPad Pro’s software keyboard, sitting under a redwood tree in a hammock. I kept the iPad flat in my lap and typed as I would on a laptop keyboard. And I was shocked at how fast my typing speed was when I really focused on the large software keyboard—not hardware keyboard speeds, but noticeably faster than my experience with the smaller iPad software keyboards.

After seeing this piece, I decided to install TapTyping and do some typing tests on my iPad Air 2. My average speed was 65 words per minute with 97% accuracy. This was much closer to my typical hardware keyboard speed than I expected it to be — about 90 wpm.

Perhaps I would be faster on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, as Jason suggests, but my brain isn’t able to work that fast most of the time and I still prefer the 9.7-inch form factor. I’m also only one year in using the iPad as my primary computer, in another year or two, I might match my hardware keyboard speeds.