Getting The Most Out Of The HKMLC Essential 55" Smart Board

In today's article we are checking out the 55" interactive Smartboard from HKMLC, featuring a 4K UHD touchscreen, Android 11 with 4 GB of RAM, and 32 GB SSD storage. An open application ecosystem allows you to install apps from the Google Play Store. The 20-point multi-touch screen allows input from multiple users, and it features the Cortex A55 processor.

Thank you, HKMLC, for sending this out in exchange for an honest demo. That's what this article is: a demonstration of this product instead of a review, although I will say I am going to throw in some of my own colorful commentary on the parts that I think are pretty awesome because, as a tech enthusiast, there are a lot of cool things about this device.

Included in the package is a VESA wall mount, a full-featured remote control, and a full manual that walks you through the applications and the setup of the device. Two pens that magnetically attach to it for writing are also included.

First Look: The 55" Smartboard

All right, let's go ahead and take a look at the 55" Smartboard from HKMLC. What we're looking at here is a 55" 60 Hz IPS panel. This particular panel has a 6-millisecond response time. The pens that they ship with this—you get two of them included—magnetically attach to the front of the unit right there, and they also attach to the stand. Now, the stand is sold separately. I do like this a lot; this is pure metal, everything about it.

It arrived very quickly, and everything was well-packed. I will say, though, the stand and this monitor, or Smartboard itself rather, are very heavy, especially this stand. You would not believe how heavy this thing is. I like that a lot; this thing is built to last a lifetime. It does move around quite easily, though; it's not a problem at all. The caster wheels do lock on the bottom, so you can get that locked down into place.

Also, in addition to that, they do include the base of the mount, so if you want to attach this to your wall, you can do that. I should also mention the stand features three different height adjustments, so I'm on the highest setting right now. You can go to lower than this setting here, and you can fine-tune the adjustment even further with your VESA mount, just like you would on any normal television.

Connectivity and Ports

Before we dive into all the functionality of the 55" Smartboard here, let's go ahead and take a look at all the port selections because we have ports in the front, we have ports on the side, and ports that run all the way along the bottom.

On the front, we have our power button, a USB type-C connection, HDMI, an auxiliary touch input if you want to use a secondary touch input device, and two USB 3.0 inputs. On the side, we have our master power on/off, one of four Wi-Fi connection antenna hookups, our microphone input, an RS232 jack, Optical out, VGA in, and PC audio in.

On the bottom, we have an RJ45 in, a line out, another secondary touch input device connection, two HDMI ports, a USB 2.0 port, a USB 3.0 port, and three more Wi-Fi antenna connection ports. I should mention that all the Wi-Fi antennas are included.

Functionality Demo

All right, let's go ahead and begin demonstrating the functionality of the HKMLC 55" Smartboard. This is a main screen; this is a screen that you're going to be presented with every time you turn the unit on, and it's really easy to turn the unit on or off. Press and hold with five fingers turns the screen off; press and hold again with five fingers, and it turns the screen back on.

First things first, if we swipe to the right, this is going to present us with an information screen. This is customizable. If we go over here and we press anywhere on the screen, we're going to have the set option. This allows us to pick between different templates, as well as adjust all the fonts. We can go here to template, we can choose one of the basic predefined templates that they already provide, and we can also go to customize and we can pick any one of these templates to customize it.

What we can do is we can tap on any one of these, and we can change the parameters. So, I have Rader Tech here; we can change this out to be whatever we like. We also have the ability to insert music and articles, and the whole purpose of this screen is basically if you own a company, an organization, or you have a presentation going on at university, this allows you to set up a presentation screen for when people enter the room. You know, they're coming in and out of the room. You can have your company logo up here, you can have an article plane. Say you're an HR department and you're talking about your open enrollment benefits, you might have a slideshow presented on here, then when you're ready to actually get to your main presentation, you just go like this and swipe back to your main board.

As you can see on the main screen, we have the date and time, and four the main applications that are used with the Smartboard, and over here to the right and to the left, it's the same menu. We can just tap right here on this arrow, and this brings up a context menu. This allows us to go back, go home, open up any existing tasks that we can close out. We have some quick shortcuts to applications here that we can also set right here with this application icon. So, it comes preloaded with most of these applications. However, you can take it a little step further by tapping on the Git Store icon, and that's going to load this up and prompt you for some install directions on getting the Google Play Store.

Once you go through those steps, we'll go ahead and close out of this by hitting our task changer right here. All right, we'll go ahead and hit the X; that's going to close out of that. We'll go back here. Once you complete the steps for Git Store, that's going to install the Google Play Store, so you can go ahead and install any applications you want.

Here we go with the Google Play Store open, so you can install any of the Android-based apps here. That's one thing I should clarify before we go any further. So, this particular model is an Android-based model only. However, HKMLC does make some other models, both in 55" and 75" variations, that are also dual boots, so they have Windows and Android on them, and a couple of those models also have a built-in camera. So, when you check the links in the description, make sure you check out the other models, because there are other models that are more featured than this one here. In fact, this is the most bare-bones model, so when you're comparing this to the other models, do understand that everything you see here is going to be included in the other offerings along with more functionality. As you see here, we have Google Play services support. That's awesome.

If we go back into the app selection screen, you'll see that we have quite a few different pre-installed apps: a browser, we have cloud storage, EFS Share Pro is for sharing from your iPads and Apple devices, we have finder—this is basically just your built-in file storage. We go back here, we also have the Git Store that we talked about. Mirror is just like this one, except this is for Android devices, so you can screencast from both Android and Apple devices. They got you covered across the board.

We check out Keeper here; this is a system optimization app that comes built-in. We'll go back to our apps again. We already covered the Play Store. Next, we have settings. All right, and this is where we can make our adjustments, like entering our Wi-Fi information. We have our personal information here, input and output, we have some system functionality here, the normal stuff that you would expect on Android, and then about. So, you do have some basic settings available to you. Then, the pen icon—well, this is really cool here, so if we tap on this and give it just a second, this is going to load up an annotation quick screen writing settings, so we can go ahead and select a pen and on anywhere on our screen we can just start writing, and you can take a screenshot. You can do anything—this can be while you're doing anything on the screen, watching a YouTube article, screencasting from another device, whatever it is, doing in the middle of a presentation, it doesn't matter. You can pull up this annotation bar and start annotating at any time.

Below the pen, we have this settings icon here, and if we go into that, this is going to pull up our different inputs. We do have several inputs, like we talked about at the beginning of the article, and in addition to that, we have some advanced settings, so you can fine-tune your audio. We have some screen settings that can be adjusted, display, and further adjustments, so we have quite a few different settings here to get the most out of this display.

Lastly, on the side toolbar, we have more tools, and this is going to pull up a lot of cool stuff. So, we have a timer, stopwatch, and if you pull these up, you can get an idea of what they look like. We also have a stopwatch. We can do a screen record. We can freeze frame, so if you want to freeze whatever it is you're in the middle of, you can do that. We can crop part of the screen. We can go into split screen screen mode in case you have more than one input connected, or you're wirelessly casting to one side of the screen and you're using an input device like HDMI or USBC on the other. We can pull up the camera; however, this is the most budget-friendly option of their offerings, so this particular unit does not have the built-in camera. We have a pull-in kit, fast file transfer, which allows us to send files via a QR code, which is pretty sweet. We have a lot of QR code functionality within this device for sending and receiving notes, files, all kinds of stuff. They really do make it easy.

We also have a perpetual calendar that we can pull up, and we can maximize this if you want as well. Let's go ahead and do that. Sorry if it's going out of focus a little bit. In addition to that, we can add new events to the calendar, so you will have this on your screen every time the screen comes up if you so choose to leave your calendar up, so you can track all your doings right here in the built-in calendar. Then, we also have a touch overlay and screen lock in addition to the toolbar on the right, and it's also on the left here. So, if we come over here and tap on this, you're going to see it's the same exact toolbar. In addition to that, we have our Wi-Fi icon up top, and we can tap on that and quickly adjust our Wi-Fi settings. If your particular model has a built-in camera, this is where you can quickly access your camera functionality. You'll see this one slashed out because this particular unit does not have the built-in camera. Then, we have a quick shortcut to our main settings as well, so lots of different ways to get into your settings.

Another cool piece of functionality is the built-in quick menu. This is pretty awesome, so what you do is you take two fingers, press them anywhere on the screen, and that's going to pull up this quick menu here. So, this first set of menu options are static, so the first screen isn't adjustable. This one gets you back to your home screen, opens up your task window, etc., some of your main core functionalities like going into your settings and pulling up the annotation, the quick annotation toolbar that we showed. Now, if we swipe over here to the right, this pulls up a second one that we can edit, so we can go ahead and add our own tools here. When you first get the device, all these are going to be blank entries, and to edit that, you're going to go ahead and tap on those three dots, and that's going to pull up the edit menu, and we can remove these applications from the wheel here, and we can add these other ones to it. As you install more applications from the Google Play Store, they'll show up in this list, so you can basically have a quick shortcut to any of your favorite applications.

Another cool thing that we can do with this pop-up toolbar is we can drag this to the bottom or top here. Let's do that real quick, and what that's going to do is it's going to turn that toolbar into a perpetual toolbar, a persistent one up at the top, and you can move this down to the bottom wherever you like, or we can go ahead and just grab it here and move it right back to the middle of the screen like we had it. Just tap anywhere to get rid of it, and that little box will go away in just a few seconds.

Pre-Installed Applications

All right, now we're going to spend some time taking a look at the four main applications that come pre-installed and are going to be on the home screen of the HKMLC. The first one we're going to take a look at is the Notes application. This is a very full-featured note application. I primarily use Samsung Notes, and this is very similar in the functionality that it adds, and we're going to spend a lot of time in this application because it is indeed one of the main use cases for picking up this Smartboard.

Here we are with the Notes application open. I have it defaulted to a black screen; that's how all my notes are. I prefer dark mode on everything, so I have it set this way. You can set it to white, you can set it to line paper. We're going to cover that in just a moment. So, at the bottom, we have a toolbar that we can completely customize. We're going to go over the functionality of all these things here in just a moment. Let's go ahead and start with the left, with the menu. So, right off the bat, we can create a new note, we can open an existing note, save, and save as, all your typical features, but we also have the ability to import and export, so we can bring in images, PDFs, and we can also export our note as an image or a PDF as well. We can upload to cloud storage, and this next option is really nice; this is a theme option, so if we come over here.

Nonetheless, we have these templates, so as we tap on each one of these, you'll see it adds a lot of stuff to the note itself, like we can change it to musical notation, we have a couple of different options for that, we have some sports themes here, so basically this gives you a nice head start into creating a note that might be applicable to one of these themes. I can definitely see some of the music notation and some of these line ones being used quite heavily, and in addition to the templates, we can also adjust the background. Like I mentioned, I pick black, but you have the option to pick whatever color you want here to whatever your liking is, so that's pretty awesome. Next, we can send the note as an email, and we also have these settings. Let's go ahead and dip into the settings a little bit.

All right, so we have two different eraser modes. A regular eraser is like what you would think—you just take the back side of the pen, and you're just going to draw over whatever you want to erase, and the erase selection is basically you're just going to select around a portion, and then it's going to erase it, so you have two different erase options. We'll demo that in a little bit once we start generating some notes here. Multifinger writing—now, this is a very important option, so I personally leave this off when I'm using the Smartboard by myself.

Because what happens is if we turn this on, this allows multiple fingers to be writing on the screen at once, at the same time. That includes pens, fingers, etc. Now, this could be very beneficial if you have two or more people writing on the right board at the same time because do keep in mind we have 20-point multi-touch here to where you can have 20 different fingers touching on the screen at the same time. So, what happens is when this is turned on, if you're writing by yourself, you may notice you're accidentally touching the screen here and there while you're writing, and you'll get accidental touches just like this right here while you're writing. Obviously, I'm exaggerating that a little bit, but as you get to writing, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to brush up against a screen. It is very sensitive; it picks up your input very easily. However, with this setting turned off, it's now just going to accept single input, and I find that I make far less mistakes in this mode when I'm using the Smartboard by myself. We have an automatic brightness setting if you wanted to adjust the brightness while you're taking the notes. I personally leave this off, but the option is there, and then we have the ability to customize the toolbar, so we have some that are predefined that you can't adjust; they're always going to be there, but other ones, these will go ahead and disappear in real time as I remove them. You'll see them getting removed from the toolbar, and we can go ahead and quickly add those back, and you can fully customize your toolbar to have whatever icons you want on it.

All right, continue on the bottom of our toolbar. We can exit, and this will prompt you to save before you exit the note. We have this share icon. Now, this is really clever; they really thought this through. Hit the share icon preparing to export; it's going to automatically save a copy of your note in the background. It presents a QR code. I'm going to grab my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, pull up my camera application, boom, go ahead and tap on the QR code icon, and now the note has been instantly sent to my S24 Ultra, so you can do this with any device. You have an iPad, your Samsung device, any Android Android phone, whatever it is that can read QR codes, and you're going to instantly have your note transferred over to your device, so you can do further editing, preview it, send it an email, whatever you want to do with it. It's all yours at that point, and the transfer is instant. I'm really impressed with that. The next option is list; this is going to list out our available notes that we've already taken.

All right, next in the toolbar is our selection icon. This allows us to zoom in. All right, we can zoom out on the note, we can do whatever we want to it without actually inputting on the device, you know, it's not going to leave any marks or anything like that, so if you want to move stuff around, this is how you do it. Next, we have the pen icon, so if we tap on that again, it's going to pull up four available pens. The first three are regular style-type pens with different heads on them, so they'll have a different look and feel on the screen. Let me go back into that real quick. The last pen here is a magic pen, so let me demonstrate this real quick. We'll go ahead and pick that. So, with the magic pen selected, what happens is as we start writing, so I'll put a t here, it's going to give recommendations in real time as you're writing along. This is pretty cool for inspiration, or if you're looking for a particular icon that you want to include that you definitely can't draw yourself, like I could never draw that hammer there. I find it to get in the way quite a bit when I'm actually trying to write out notes and stuff, and that's where these other three pens come in handy. Any of these will be a regular-type pen, so when you come here and start writing, I can write a t; it's not going to prompt you for the AI insertion of like different images and stuff, so keep that in mind during your PIN selection. In addition to picking between the magic pen and three regular pens, we can also adjust the color, and we can adjust the pin action for both the front side of the pin and the back, so you can adjust the pointer for both sides.

Next, we have the Eraser, so if we go ahead and tap on that, we can pick the size that we want that eraser bubble to be, and remember in the settings you can pick between this form of eraser or one where you circle around it and it's going to erase. I personally prefer this one, so with it like that you're going to see as I go over the te here it's going to start erasing stuff we have that little tiny dot right there it's going to get rid of that so it works just as you would expect next we have clear all which does exactly what you'd expect as well it's going to uh clear the screen just like that next option is a bunch of rulers so these are pretty cool we can go ahead and throw a ruler on the screen we can move it around we can adjust the width of it all right it's it's not going to scale or anything the inches will stay as an actual inch and we can also sorry if it's going out of focus while I do that uh but we can also rotate it like this you can move them around you can do this for any of the rulers that's why I'm just showing the one here and then we can come over here to the X and get rid of it now one of these rulers actually has a lot of functionality let me go back to rulers here um we go to the protractor one let me head over here to this side again I can move this over here and we can create this line and we can stamp a line by hitting this green check mark all right so that's going to stamp a line there and let's say I want to go up to 45° or so we'll go right up here and uh we'll stamp another line I think you get the idea we'll go up to 90 and I will stamp another line now we have line stamped in each one of these areas I think I got one there yeah and once we're done with that we can go ahead and hit the X here and that'll leave our lines and then get rid of the protractor see you have a lot of ways of getting nice even lines on your display while you're taking notes that's pretty awesome next we have shapes so we have an option of picking between two-dimensional and threedimensional shapes and we can also adjust the color of the shape and uh it's going to be just as you would expect so we'll go ahead and hit this one right here and you just start from a corner start drawing and it's going to draw that shape perfectly for you this next option is called Partition this is pretty awesome let's go ahead and tap on that real quick what this does is it divides a screen into three even panels and what this is designed for is for more than one person to use a Smartboard at a time and what's really cool is each person using the board can fine-tune their pen we can pick between these options we can also adjust the color of the pen and the other thing that's cool too is as they're writing in their area like we'll go ahead and put test here and if we put a line here look what happens the line stops over there if I start here and putting a line here the line's going to stop there there and if I start here and I go to the left and I go over to the right that Line's going to stop there basically each person has their separate section that they can't go over into the other person section and once they're done you'll hit this back button right here in the corner that's going to get rid of the overlays and leave whatever they wrote each person so a nice way to offer separate screen real estate for more than one person using the Smartboard at the same time all right the next option is table and this is a lot like Microsoft cell where you can drag over and pick how many columns that you want and you can drag down to pick how many rows you want and uh we'll go back to table there sorry I slipped off it uh we'll go ahead and hit insert that's going to insert a table you can go ahead and start drawing on these uh the other thing you can do is anytime you put an object up on the screen you can switch over to the selection mode right there and now we can select the object we'll just tap in the corner here we can expand it we can move it around right so we can do anything we want with our table here we can put it on the top and we can also add more rows and columns by hitting these plus signs so a lot of different functionality built into the table option here next we have mind maps so we'll go ahead and tap on this and that's going to pull up a basic mind map if we tap on these we can go ahead and add more M maps to it all right we can add another one to the side over here tap on this one add another one over here we can come over to this side and add more over here just like that and once you have them there you'll go ahead and switch to your pen once you have them all set up how you want or as you're going along go ahead and just start writing in them and what's going to happen is it's going to Auto detect your text and it's going to provide you with some options here you'll go ahead and pick the one that's correct there you go it's going to format it for you automatically now let's say you end up writing something that you're not happy with all you have to do is take your pen come over here it's going to swipe like that it's going to go right away and also don't forget we can also pick the selection pointer and we can zoom out and zoom in on the mind maps so if you want to add a lot more nodes to it than what you see on the screen that's a nice way of doing it then you can expand back in to get to the details all right next we have sticky notes so just as the name applies we can go ahead and add a sticky note once you have what you like you hit okay and it'll be in that color and you can add as many of these sticky notes as you want we'll just hit okay okay we'll pick a different color hit okay okay they'll go ahead and line up across here and you can move them wherever you want all right our next option is preview so you can go ahead and tap on this and if you tap on it again it'll give you a small popup window of everything on the screen and then what this allows you to do is just move it around and preview it and the thing I notice is that if you're zooming in and out and stuff in this preview mode it uh Works a little bit faster than if you're using the selection tool so if you're want to move around on your screen quite a bit I do recommend you switch over to this preview mode all right the next option we have is grid so we'll go ahead and tap on that and what's cool about this is as you're writing hopefully that didn't go out of focus there um testing testing the Whiteboard I should say Smartboard but as you see the grid will just expand and collapse with you as you go along and then once you're done with that you can hit the selection tool and we can move this grid wherever you want and uh you'll see it automatically does some correction here it got this one wrong just like before we can just swipe with the PIN to get rid of that and do a retry so a pretty cool way to add some grid functionality into your note and as you would expect we have an undo and redo feature to go back and uh correct some mistakes you might make we can also add additional pages to the notes and we can paginate through those pages right here and once you're done with your note again we'll come back to our menu we can save save as export we can send via email and don't forget we also have that share link there to open up the QR code for quickly transferring over to your phone so uh we can go ahead and hit save and it's going to save it to uh whatever location you pick via the file explorer here and I think that about wraps up the main functionality for the built-in note taking application next we have the file manager so this is pretty basic it's just a regular file manager like you would normally expect um and once they're connected up to your cloud storage you can also interact with it you have your basic default Android folders here you can create new folders list them out in different ways all of your basic functionality that you would expect in a standard Android based file system system the next option we have is screen share so we'll go ahead and tap on that once this loads up this prompts you to download a quick client application so I'm going to go ahead and grab my phone and we'll give this a whirl all right we're going to go out and download the client real quick and this is going to be the eshare client and once you're connected with eshare you can go ahead and start a session for screen sharing or TV mirroring and here's an example of what TV mirroring looks like you see the uh TV screen right here on the phone and we can go vice versa with that as well pretty awesome stuff and the last of the four main apps here is our browser and it's just like you would expect this is going to take us out to a browser um looks like I was on YouTube Last so it's going to load that up yes you can watch YouTube and all that good stuff on here um what's really cool like we mentioned is you can pull up The annotation bar and uh we can grab one of the pin here uh as mentioned at the start of the article it does come with two pin so we can go ahead and start an notating right as we're uh in the middle of a YouTube article test awesome and you can do that anywhere you want if you're working with an Office document here on YouTube doesn't even matter you can write right on the screen you can do a screen capture take a Ste all those types of things and it'll capture whatever you're writing with the image all in the same time pretty sweet stuff now let's go ahead and demonstrate the Audio I went ahead and turn the volume all the way up and you can do that quickly right here with this icon here and we have controls for our audio and our brightness you'll notice here I have the brightness all the way down as well that's because it's a very bright screen and uh it just shows up way too much on camera so the volume's all the way up we've got the volume cranked up on YouTube um it's not a very wide sound but it's very loud or Samsung's good loock is a free customization Suite designed to help you to get the most out of your Samsung Galaxy device aailable for free in the Sam Galaxy store if you don't happen to see good luck in the Samsung Galaxy store there's a link uh that gets Extremely Loud

Tips and Additional Connectivity Options

Now it's time for a couple of tips to help you get the most out of this device. I recommend every few months, go ahead and hop into your applications, go into settings. Once this loads up, we're going to go over to the system. There we go, scroll down a little bit, and I recommend you check for a system update. We have a check update button here. You want to check on this every few months to make sure your Android system is all the way up to date and you have the latest security update, so this is how you do it right here. Another thing I recommend is don't shy away from this WPS office. This is actually a full-featured Office application with direct integration for Microsoft Office as well, so if you're used to working with PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, all of that stuff, you have all of that functionality here is as well as cloud storage, so you can interact directly with your Microsoft Office applications from within this application, so definitely don't sleep on this, you definitely want to check it out and this is the full version of the product, so it's not like a limited time trial or any of that type of funny business. So lastly for the HKMLC 55" Smartboard I want to talk about additional connectivity options so in addition to all the mirrorcast and eshare pro options we can also do hardwired connections um and you'll see here I have a two- wired connection going um so you can do a single wire or two wire connection so with a single wire connection you can run display over USBC if your system supports it and with a two- wied connection you can run via HDMI which I'm demonstrating here and you can also still wire up with uhbc for your data needs so you can do a singlewire or two- wired connection so basically you have a plethora of connection options for this thing.

Conclusion

That's going to wrap up our demo of the HKMLC 55" Smartboard. Thanks again, HKMLC, for sending this out. If you have any questions or comments about this Smartboard, please dropping down in the comments section below. I really do appreciate your time and as always thanks for watching.