Logitech Combo Touch review: great and affordable Magic Keyboard alternative

The Logitech Combo Touch is an interesting and above all affordable alternative to Apple’s own Magic Keyboard. Especially useful is the built-in trackpad, which allows you to work a lot more productively. We have tested the cover for you.

Logitech Combo Touch review

The Logitech Combo Touch has been available for a while and an alternative to the Magic Keyboard, where it is particularly striking that it is a lot cheaper. The Combo Touch has a suggested retail price of 149 euros and is available for the regular iPad (7th and 8th generation), iPad Air (2019) and 10.5-inch version of the iPad Pro. I tested the cover with the iPad Air.

In this review you can read how the iPad cover works in practice and whether the trackpad really ensures that you no longer have to touch the iPad screen to operate the device.

Neat cover is pretty bulky

Let’s start with the design of the Logitech Combo Touch. The iPad cover looks sleek and feels luxurious because of the woven fabric on the outside. The case consists of two parts (the cover itself and the keyboard) and you can easily click the keyboard off when you don’t need it. You can keep an Apple Pencil (or Logitech’s own Crayon) in the loop at the top, which is handy.

It is true that the Combo Touch is quite thick and heavy, and that makes your iPad a lot more bulky. This is not a disaster, but you have to take into account that your Apple tablet is suddenly less handy. To illustrate: if the iPad Air is in the Combo Touch, it is thicker than my MacBook Pro.

The iPad does click easily into the cover and it offers a lot of protection. It also works immediately, so you can immediately use the keyboard and trackpad. The Logitech Combo Touch connects to the Smart Connector and receives power. This works – as we know from other iPad covers – nice and fast, so you only need to charge your iPad to use the Combo Touch.

Trackpad and keyboard

Much more important about the Logitech Combo Touch is of course the keyboard and the integrated trackpad. The keyboard ticks away nicely and you can tap comfortably for hours on end. I don’t like the keyboard as much as that of a MacBook or Apple’s separate keyboards, but the difference is small. The keys feel sturdy (and not cheap) and ‘click’ nicely.

Handy are the function buttons at the top of the keyboard. With those buttons you can quickly perform certain actions, such as adjusting the brightness or turning the sound up or down. Also nice is the backlight of the keyboard, so that you can make the keys light up when you work in the dark. The Logitech Slim Folio that we tested previously lacked this function, so it is useful that the backlight is present.

The trackpad also works fine and you will automatically see a cursor appear on the iPad screen when you place your finger on the trackpad. The trackpad may be a bit on the small side, but actually just big enough. I myself have adjusted the speed of the cursor slightly to avoid touching the edges of the trackpad too often.

I also find it annoying that you can only press the bottom of the trackpad. Fortunately, you can enable the ‘Tap to click’ option via the iPad settings (at ‘General> trackpad’), so that you can also use the top of the trackpad to open an app, for example. The trackpad also supports multi-touch gestures and they work fine, although you will notice that the trackpad is a bit small.

Logitech Control app

Finally, it is useful to download the Logitech Control app on your iPad when you purchase the Combo Touch. Logitech releases improvements for the cover in the form of firmware updates, which you can download and install via the app.