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Hey guys, it's Sam with the Blind Life.
Welcome back to the channel! Today, I've got something really cool to show you. This is the HKMLC 55-inch 4K Smartboard. It's essentially a Smartboard, a whiteboard, and even a 55-inch Android tablet with a ton of potential.
Now, a Smartboard might not be something we would normally think about as a piece of technology for the blind and visually impaired. But, as I said, it has a lot of potential, especially when you consider that it's basically just a 55-inch Android tablet. It has the Google Play Store, so you're able to load in all of your favorite Android apps, and for the most part, they all work.
Not only does it have a ton of input ports like several HDMIs and USB ports, but it's already set up for not only screen sharing but screen mirroring. So, whether you're doing it wirelessly or through one of the ports, you can easily connect your iPad to this, your Windows computer to this, your MacBook to this, and have a much larger and, in many cases, a touchscreen experience.
As always, let's talk about the hardware first, and then we'll dive into the system and see what it can do and check out all the features. As far as hardware, HKMLC—I have no idea what that stands for, but that's the brand of these smartboards. This particular model is the 55-inch, and hardware-wise, it is rock solid. The thing weighs a ton, which indicates to me that it's very well built.
As far as accessories, it comes with a wall mount, so you'll be ready to attach it to a wall right away. It also comes with a very long power cord, four Wi-Fi antennas, and two magnetic stylists. There's even a little spot right down here on the front where you can hold one of the stylists. And here's a little tip: the entire back is made out of metal, so you can just have your extra stylus back there that way you'll never lose it.
It also came with a manual that's very helpful for figuring out how to use the device. And a quick tip: you can download this manual as a PDF online. The Smartboard also comes with a remote control, and you can do most of the important functions, navigating the menus and all of that, with the remote. If you don't want to mount this to a wall, you can also purchase an addition stand. It's a rolling stand that lets you mount the Smartboard at a variety of heights and even has wheels, so you can roll it around wherever you need it.
As I said, of course, the Smartboard is a touchscreen. First, you have this welcome screen. It has the time, the date, and then you have a couple of apps. I'll also mention that a lot of this is customizable, changing wallpapers, rearranging different elements. By default, we have the Notes application, we have the file explorer or the file manager as it's called here, screen share, and the browser.
So just to reiterate, this is a fully working touchscreen. I can tap on things to bring them up. Here we are on my YouTube channel. Let's watch a article real quick. Today, we're taking a look at a brand new wearable device. All right, so let's talk about the new Maggie Ivr.
As on either side of the screen at all times, you have this little arrow sticking out, and if I tap on that, a little toolbar will pop out. Here we have some different options. The very top is a back button. If you're in an application and you need to go back, you can tap that. Right under there, you have a home button that will always take you back to your home screen. Here beneath that, we have running applications, and when you're done with an application, you can just swipe it to the left and get rid of it. Beneath that, we have the Whiteboard, then we have our file manager, and then we have our app drawer. This is where all of your applications live. This is where when you install Android applications, they will be here as well. I was playing a little bit of Angry Birds earlier, and it works great.
Beneath your app drawer, you have a pin icon, and this will turn on annotations. No matter where you are, it does not matter what screen you're on, you can always turn on annotations and draw on the screen. You see we have a toolbar, and I can move this wherever I want to. We have our pin tool here, and I can tap on it to drop down the customizable pin options, so I can set the size of my stroke, I can change my color, tap the pin again to get rid of it, and you see now that the highlight color has changed indicating what color we have set. So if I want to draw some arrows or I want to circle something to indicate this is important, I can do that. We have a brush tool, tapping that once again brings open all of our brush controls. I'm going to set it to white.
If I do have something marked and I want to save it, I can do that, and it saves that file, it saves a screenshot. We can insert, and this has simply inserted this image that we were just on. It inserted it into the Whiteboard, and I can move it around, I can manipulate it, make it larger or smaller. And now we have a bunch of items here. We have a menu that we can interact with. This props this image if I need to click okay, now it's been cropped. I can flip either horizontal Al or vertical, I can clone it, make two of those if I want, and then of course I can hit the delete to delete that, and then we can go back to where we were.
Here we are in the browser, and I'm on my website here, and you can see that it works just like it would on a tablet. I can pinch to zoom, which is super helpful for us. If I wanted to try and read this a little bit better, I could do that.
The Whiteboard itself has a ton of functionality. You'll see that it supports multi-touch input, not only multi-touch but up to 20 multi-touch inputs at one time, kind of crazy. Obviously, you have all the controls down at the bottom for the pin tool, the brush, the Eraser. We can do different shapes, so you want triangles, what kind of triangle do you want? We can put in a ruler, virtual ruler. You can change the length of the the ruler, you can move it wherever you need to, or even rotate the ruler. We have an eraser, but we can also just tap the clear to clear everything all at once.
We have a menu over here on the far left that's really cool, has a ton of stuff like saving, loading, exporting, all of that. But one thing I like is there's templates here, and if I tap on that, brings up our menu, and there are lots of grid lines and things that you can choose from, checkerboard, sheet music, what if you're a coach and you need to run some plays here with the team? Just a ton of possibilities. And then of course we can change our background.
If I want to add multiple pages, I can click add down in the bot bottom right, then I'd be able to swipe between the different pages. It also keeps a count of how many pages I have, can also click this button down here, and that will let me manipulate and move things around, so I can scoot it off to the side. So now I've created my masterpiece and I want to share this with somebody. I can click the share button down here in the bottom left, and now it created a QR code that anybody can scan to get this, and here is that terrible drawing of Vegeta saying hello world got it right here on my phone super easy.
One of the things I'm very excited about, and you've already probably seen it so far in this article, is I can do really easy screen recordings with this Smartboard. So I just bring open my little toolbar menu here at the side, and I can tap the extra tools down here at the bottom, and in here we have a ton of extra tools like a stopwatch, a timer, I can do a split screen where maybe let's choose the browser on one side and then we'll choose our File Explorer on the other. So now we have split screen. I can basically use this like two different applications running, and I can adjust the size.
But something else down here in the menu which I'm really loving is the screen recording, and if I tap that get a little dialogue in the middle here, I can jump into the screen recording settings if I want to you choose what resolution you want with a maximum resolution of 1080P and you choose where the file location will go, but I can just tap the red button to start I get a 3 2 1 countdown and the little menu goes down to the bottom right if I want to move this around wherever I want I can do that and we are screen recording so this is going to be great if you want to record gameplay maybe on a tablet if you want to record your whiteboard session.
I did see that Zoom was one of the apps you could install, so you could put a camera up here. Some of the HKMLC smartboards do have a built-in camera web camera. This particular one does not, but I could easily attach a webcam up here plug it up to one of the USB ports I could do Zoom calls I could record my zoom calls you potentially could get a higher resolution on that Zoom call than you would get recording through Zoom itself. Whenever I'm done, I just tap the stop button and I get a little message saying that it was successfully saved I can open the file and here are the articles that I've already recorded I can tap one and I get a little preview to the right with some information I have some options at the bottom like sorting this choosing which if it's a grid or a list view I could delete the file I could rename the file cut copy a lot of those that we're familiar with if I double tap it will play the recording.
So this is the recording we did a minute ago quickly I want to show you how easy it is to transfer files from the Smartboard I'm going to open up our file manager and we have a few options for transferring files number one is we have our cloud storage now you can connect uh different kinds of cloud storages to this like a Google Drive and then you'll be able to transfer them that way but just for Simplicity I've plugged in a flash drive into the USB port and now it's showing up on the left side here as USB I have a screen recording that I want to transfer over so I'm going to go into my recordings folder and this one here on the end is the one I want to transfer so I just highlighted that as I mentioned we have some options here at the bottom if I tap on the one at the end here that's labeled as more we get the send option if I tap on that then we get a list of our connected drives I only have the one connected so I'm going to tap on USB and I get a notification at the bottom right saying that the file is being copied to my USB drive and that's how easy it is to transfer files from the Smartboard to a separate drive.
So something else really cool that I want to talk about is like I said before this is just essentially an Android tablet which means you can install apps thirdparty apps and some of those would be things like uh other whiteboard applications drawing applications now keep in mind some will not install on this device just like with Android not all Android apps work on every device but as I said you can install some of them including other whiteboard and drawing applications not nearly as responsive as the built-in whiteboard but it's nice that you're able to put these apps on and use them also okay lastly I want to show you a couple examples of screen mirroring on the Smartboard and it's super easy depending on what device you're trying to mirror you may need to install an app or some software but for the iPad here we simply just go to our Control Center and we tap our screen sharing or screen mirroring and I have a couple options but the one I'm looking for is this e share and I tap it and super quick and easy it is up and we have a huge iPad now we can do portrait but obviously landscape is going to give us a better View and it works.
Now although this this is a touchcreen the touchscreen functionality does not work with the iPad up here you still have to control the iPad from the actual iPad something else to note the zoom magnifier does not transfer over to the bigger screen so you do not see the magnification on the bigger screen however voice over recently updated voice over does workat recently updated and The Voice is coming through the speakers of the Smartboard earlier I mentioned all the different ports that this has several HDMI ports several USB ports and although you can switch to those ports using the remote control another way would be to tap on the menu button down here and you have access to all of those HDMI my ports I can switch to one of those ports if I want to super quick now I don't have anything plugged up to those ports yet but I do have my computer here and I've got an HDMI cable and I want to show you how easy it is that as soon as I plug that cable into it it automatically switch to the switches to the right port and displays my computer screen on there and now I can use my computer here in a much larger format now if I want to get full touch functionality with my computer plugged in then I need to get a special cable there is a port here it's the Touch Port it takes a special cable that you need to plug from the Smartboard into the the computer so that all the touch functionality carries through that's okay I can still use my computer here and get full functionality and connecting a much more powerful computer to this Smartboard you're going to get better per formats.
In fact real quickly let's talk about the Smartboard specifications firstly it is an LED panel and does use IPS technology as far as important input we have three 2.0 HDMI ports for USB ports we actually have quite a few we have one USB 2.0 four USB 3.0 and then a USB type-c port as well it does also have a stereo audio in and a stereo audio out if you need that but of course it does have speakers built in as well as far as the processing power it is running Android 11 the CPU is a 4 core a55 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage.
All right now that I'm all done I can either push the power button down on the bottom right I can push the power button on the remote or I could do this cool little trick where you just touch with five fingers and you hold it there for a second or two and it puts the board to sleep whenever I'm ready to use it again five fingers down after a couple seconds comes back up and we're ready to go.
Okay guys so this was the HKMLC 55 in Smartboard there's a lot of things I really like about this Smartboard and are a lot of fun and for someone who needs something like this definitely like a teacher in a classroom setting or a business professional you're going to use this in the meeting room these things are amazing and fantastic for those of us with low vision there are some things that make it kind of enticing number one the touchcreen the giant touchscreen and essentially being a giant tablet Android tablet that you can put your apps on and interact with them on a very large screen that's pretty cool however there are a couple things that don't work for us and this is definitely a message to the developers of the Smartboard it does not have any accessibility even though it is on Android it's running Android 11 it does not have any accessibility and that is not good guys you've got to put accessibility in this it's 2024 what are you doing not having any accessibility you have a section here for personalize you have a section for system you could easily throw in some accessibility number one a dark mode invert the screen so it would be white text on a black background or at the very least give us a way to enlarge the text or better yet since this is just a giant touchcreen give us a way to zoom in like we can do on all of our other devices I mean every single computer every single smartphone every single tablet out there has amazing accessibility built into it and you guys have just stripped it all out of this I do not understand why if you could throw in some accessibility that would allow me to make things larger things like this this little this little menu why is that so small we could make it much bigger but all of these different toolbars they're should be an easy way in the settings to adjust the size of these onscreen elements make them larger you've got all this screen real estate you've got these little toolbars down at the bottom let's make them much larger there take that into the boardroom and fix this problem now the benefit of this is that this is still really large 55 in so a lot of this I can get close enough and see it and still make it out so that I I can still use this relatively easily air quotes easily but they could also easily put in some accessibility to make it a much more enjoyable experience.
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