From the DIY drawer: Apple keyboard Galaxy Tab mod
There are days when I want to find the person who designed certain lecture halls and super glue his or her butt to one of the seats, leaving that person there to test the comfort of his or her own creation. This year, there will be many such days, as the lecture halls that my class has been assigned aren’t exactly made with personal space in mind. My iPad can barely fit on what is supposed to be a table, and if you want to use a normal sized laptop, you better ask the person in front of you if he or she minds having half a laptop on their head.
Because of this issue, I started thinking about the possibility of making a “mini-laptop” using my Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. It’s useless for PDF annotation and anything else that requires good note taking software, but at least I can type some text into it and have the files automatically sync to Dropbox using Dropsync.
I have the official Apple Bluetooth keyboard, but I haven’t used it in quite some time. I tend to use the iPad by itself, as propping it up in small spaces isn’t easy. As such, I really didn’t have any issues with doing a bit of physical modification – or addition – to it. I took a case for the 7.0 Plus that I haven’t really used at all, and cut out a “tray” that was fitted for one side of the tablet. Using hot glue, some random hard plastic pieces, and an elastic band, I managed to create a Galaxy Tab holder that is permanently attached to the keyboard. I added a bit of metal underneath the keyboard to balance it out, preventing it from falling over when the Tab is inserted.
The mod seems to be working as intended, but I need to test it out in practice. Samsung has a tendency to make portrait mode keyboard docks that connect via the dock connector on the bottom, and the 7.0 Plus is no different. I’d argue that a landscape setup is more logical, and that’s what I’ve created here.
