welcome to my unboxing of the AO KB 178
RT mini thumb keyboard so as you guys
may or may not know if you've watched a few of my videos I'm kind of a fan of
keyboards and mice and pointing devices that make life easier with a media PC
because I'm one of the seven people in the world who actually has one so
actually no there's more than seven but you know uh so so let's have a look at
this guy compact form factor designed specifically for home theater PCS Easy
navigation using the built-in Optical track ball now that's cool eight
dedicated multimedia hot Keys including all the ones you can see here you can
read them if you really care 2.4 GHz RF technology provides up to 30 ft in
wireless range that's not bad because I have actually run into products that I
haven't been able to get to work properly from the couch which is ridiculous okay so rechargeable
batteries included awesome scissor key caps architecture makes typing silent
stable and comfortable uh scissor keys are not necessarily the most durable but
as they pointed out they are very quiet so there's that going for it compatible
with Windows 7 comes with a mini USB dongle built-in track ball with left-handed Mouse buttons and let's open
this bad boy up oh it's actually smaller than I thought when I saw the size of
the box I thought I was going to be like oh how am I going to reach the middle keys but it's actually much much smaller
than that so I can reach the middle Keys just fine cool okay so here we go oh oh
no way it comes with actual rechargeable
nickel metal hydride batteries look at
that like it you know how normally when something says comes with rechargeable
battery I was even thinking I was like oh well what about when the battery runs
out what am I going to do with like some proprietary internal battery keyboard
I'm not going to be able to use my computer no way comes with rechargeable
aaa's bam I just got bammed by AIO
because they were all like yeah we thought of that huh cool okay it comes
with wow they weren't kidding when they said I like mini USB receiver they get
that stuck in the port no you couldn't but okay and then there's your charging
cable so that's pretty cool so you plug that into one of your USB ports you plug
that into one of your other USB ports you throw these guys into the keyboard
itself so let's go ahead and do that now okay you got your pairing button you got
your onoff button you can turn it off if you don't want to waste your battery
uh let's go ahead and uh see if we can
get that in there y okay so there it is
so let's have a look at what we think of the overall the overall build of this
guy so can we type on it with our fingers not really okay so when they
call it a thumb keyboard they really do mean it the space bar even with my smallish hands so guys bear in mind my
hands are not very big here Slick's hand for for context see that's the size of
my hand compared to Slick's hand so there see okay so remember that so even
with my small hands I can easily reach the space bar with both with both hands
okay so my home row keys are where are they yeah they're here and here right
yeah my home row keys are not quite centered it's a bit of a pet peeve for
me personally for thumb keyboards I wish it was a little bit over here but
they're not as far off as the one that I'm using now which really bugs me
because it's like not even close it's like over here like something stupid like that
um okay so home R keys are fairly easy to reach as well I can reach Escape I
can reach backspace very easily enter is here one shift key I wouldn't have
minded seeing two shift Keys it would have been better if there's one over here but I can see why they made that
change because they had to put in the arrow keys they had to put them
somewhere and I don't really see what other options they have because what
else is cool about this is check this out it has almost everything it's got your caps lock it's got does it have a
no it doesn't have a number pad but it's got your f8 keys are all built in with a
function key it's got like dedicated bracket keys so you can type almost
anything with this thing without any challenges you've also got a battery
life indicator and uh something about
rechargeable batteries I don't know what that would actually indicate but then
you've got a bunch of media buttons as well and here are your left and right
click button so this is an optical track ball let's find out how well it works so
here let's just like plug this in let's see how quickly we can get it going out
of the box okay so plug the thing into the
thing make sure my hold on don't point at the computer yet I need to make sure
that I don't have anything inappropriate up on my screen okay there we're good
and installing device driver USB composite device RF dongle I'm going
to stand over here so that I'm kind of under the light so you guys can see the keyboard somewhat searching Windows
update I'm going to press the pairing thing now to see if that does anything
oh it's kind of recessed it's kind of oh it's kind of tough to press actually oh
yeah you can when in doubt just use a
knife okay so it claims it's ready to
use on the computer side anyway so let's press
the uh home button what's the home button going to do okay maybe I should
actually open something and try to type let's see if it's working yet oh
not yet okay oh oh oh I didn't turn it
on ha okay let's bring back the knife
see this is the kind of stuff that goes on off camera sometimes so I'm being
very brave when I actually work on things on camera with you people because
as you can clearly see I'm not actually that good at using computer stuff there
we go it's working okay so let's type
like uh
hello world hey
hey oh did I accidentally hit the oh I did shoot I accidentally hit the eye
it's okay can backspace hello world very
usable so if you just want to Google something or whatever else then uh
that's cool and let's oh let's try the track ball okay hey that's actually not
that hard to use check this out so I'm going to go and I'm going to save this
particular document and I'm going to put it in my Starcraft 2 folder because that
makes a lot of sense let's go ahead and save it there this is very very usable
cool okay so that's the AO thumb keyboard thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer
videos of things that actually include rechargeable AAA batteries holy crap
I've never seen this before