Azio KB178RT Mini Thumb Keyboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,365 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the AO KB 178
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RT mini thumb keyboard so as you guys
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may or may not know if you've watched a few of my videos I'm kind of a fan of
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keyboards and mice and pointing devices that make life easier with a media PC
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because I'm one of the seven people in the world who actually has one so
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actually no there's more than seven but you know uh so so let's have a look at
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this guy compact form factor designed specifically for home theater PCS Easy
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navigation using the built-in Optical track ball now that's cool eight
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dedicated multimedia hot Keys including all the ones you can see here you can
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read them if you really care 2.4 GHz RF technology provides up to 30 ft in
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wireless range that's not bad because I have actually run into products that I
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haven't been able to get to work properly from the couch which is ridiculous okay so rechargeable
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batteries included awesome scissor key caps architecture makes typing silent
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stable and comfortable uh scissor keys are not necessarily the most durable but
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as they pointed out they are very quiet so there's that going for it compatible
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with Windows 7 comes with a mini USB dongle built-in track ball with left-handed Mouse buttons and let's open
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this bad boy up oh it's actually smaller than I thought when I saw the size of
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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
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than that so I can reach the middle Keys just fine cool okay so here we go oh oh
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no way it comes with actual rechargeable
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nickel metal hydride batteries look at
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that like it you know how normally when something says comes with rechargeable
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battery I was even thinking I was like oh well what about when the battery runs
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out what am I going to do with like some proprietary internal battery keyboard
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I'm not going to be able to use my computer no way comes with rechargeable
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aaa's bam I just got bammed by AIO
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because they were all like yeah we thought of that huh cool okay it comes
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with wow they weren't kidding when they said I like mini USB receiver they get
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that stuck in the port no you couldn't but okay and then there's your charging
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cable so that's pretty cool so you plug that into one of your USB ports you plug
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that into one of your other USB ports you throw these guys into the keyboard
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itself so let's go ahead and do that now okay you got your pairing button you got
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your onoff button you can turn it off if you don't want to waste your battery
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uh let's go ahead and uh see if we can
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get that in there y okay so there it is
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so let's have a look at what we think of the overall the overall build of this
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guy so can we type on it with our fingers not really okay so when they
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call it a thumb keyboard they really do mean it the space bar even with my smallish hands so guys bear in mind my
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hands are not very big here Slick's hand for for context see that's the size of
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my hand compared to Slick's hand so there see okay so remember that so even
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with my small hands I can easily reach the space bar with both with both hands
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okay so my home row keys are where are they yeah they're here and here right
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yeah my home row keys are not quite centered it's a bit of a pet peeve for
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me personally for thumb keyboards I wish it was a little bit over here but
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they're not as far off as the one that I'm using now which really bugs me
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because it's like not even close it's like over here like something stupid like that
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um okay so home R keys are fairly easy to reach as well I can reach Escape I
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can reach backspace very easily enter is here one shift key I wouldn't have
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minded seeing two shift Keys it would have been better if there's one over here but I can see why they made that
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change because they had to put in the arrow keys they had to put them
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somewhere and I don't really see what other options they have because what
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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
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no it doesn't have a number pad but it's got your f8 keys are all built in with a
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function key it's got like dedicated bracket keys so you can type almost
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anything with this thing without any challenges you've also got a battery
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life indicator and uh something about
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rechargeable batteries I don't know what that would actually indicate but then
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you've got a bunch of media buttons as well and here are your left and right
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click button so this is an optical track ball let's find out how well it works so
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here let's just like plug this in let's see how quickly we can get it going out
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of the box okay so plug the thing into the
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thing make sure my hold on don't point at the computer yet I need to make sure
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that I don't have anything inappropriate up on my screen okay there we're good
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and installing device driver USB composite device RF dongle I'm going
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to stand over here so that I'm kind of under the light so you guys can see the keyboard somewhat searching Windows
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update I'm going to press the pairing thing now to see if that does anything
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oh it's kind of recessed it's kind of oh it's kind of tough to press actually oh
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yeah you can when in doubt just use a
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knife okay so it claims it's ready to
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use on the computer side anyway so let's press
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the uh home button what's the home button going to do okay maybe I should
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actually open something and try to type let's see if it's working yet oh
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not yet okay oh oh oh I didn't turn it
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on ha okay let's bring back the knife
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see this is the kind of stuff that goes on off camera sometimes so I'm being
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very brave when I actually work on things on camera with you people because
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as you can clearly see I'm not actually that good at using computer stuff there
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we go it's working okay so let's type
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like uh
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hello world hey
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hey oh did I accidentally hit the oh I did shoot I accidentally hit the eye
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it's okay can backspace hello world very
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usable so if you just want to Google something or whatever else then uh
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that's cool and let's oh let's try the track ball okay hey that's actually not
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that hard to use check this out so I'm going to go and I'm going to save this
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particular document and I'm going to put it in my Starcraft 2 folder because that
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makes a lot of sense let's go ahead and save it there this is very very usable
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cool okay so that's the AO thumb keyboard thank you for checking out my
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unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer
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videos of things that actually include rechargeable AAA batteries holy crap
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I've never seen this before