 Welcome to my unboxing of the ASIO KB178RT 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. 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 trackball. Now that's cool. Eight dedicated multimedia hotkeys 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 feet 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. So rechargeable batteries included, awesome. Scissor keycaps architecture makes typing silent, stable, and comfortable. 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 trackball 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 no way. It comes with actual rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries. Look at that. Like 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. It comes with rechargeable AAAs. Bam. I just got bammed by ASIO because they were all like yeah we thought of that. Huh cool. Okay. Comes with, wow they weren't kidding when they said 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 on off button. You can turn it off if you don't want to waste your battery. Let's go ahead and see if we can get that in there. Yeah. Okay. So there it is. So let's have a look at what we think of 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 context. 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 hands. 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, something stupid like that. Okay so home row 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 was 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...no it doesn't 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 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 buttons. So this is an optical trackball. 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 it at the computer yet. I need to make sure that I don't have anything inappropriate up on my screen. Okay that 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 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 ha ha ha ha 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 eye? Oh I did. Shoot I accidentally hit the eye. It's okay. Come back space. Oh world. Very usable. So if you just want to google something or whatever else then that's cool. And let's oh let's try the trackball. 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 ASIO thumb keyboard. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos of things that actually include rechargeable AAA batteries. Holy crap I've never seen this before.