The iPad keyboard, like other touch-screen keyboards, is also elaborately “chorded.” Press one designated key, and the whole keyset changes. One board has qwerty letters and first-tier punctuation (comma, period), a second board is numbers and second-most-used punctuation (semicolon, parentheses) and a third is important symbols (dollar sign, percent sign).
Skills with qwerty won’t help you with such sophisticated chording; you’ll have to learn to type again. In fact, the chording produces so many possibilities and the keys are so shape-shifting that the technology press produces guides with names like “71 iPad Keyboard Keys You Probably Didn’t Know Existed.”
Preserving signifiers from the analog world while changing their meaning — having touch-screen displays that look like keys but are really responsive mini-apps — introduces excitement but also unease.
via nytimes.com