Today, intelligence has become the mainstream. Smart routers, smart air conditioners, smart rice cookers, smart televisions and other smart devices have become very common. I don't think you have heard of the smart keyboard that can be built into the Android system, have you? This is why Zhiku launched OneBoard Pro+, the industry's first mechanical keyboard equipped with Android system. I first learned that such a product was in JD crowdfunding. As a digital controller and peripheral controller, I was naturally very interested in this kind of novel product, and almost participated in crowdfunding. The main reason why I finally gave up is that OneBoard Pro+, as the first keyboard product launched by Zhiku, has not been tested by the market, Moreover, the price of 1500+is not cheap. Because there are many mechanical keyboard contacts at ordinary times, they have high requirements for keyboard feel. Although they are very interested in the design of mechanical keyboard with built-in Android operating system, they did not participate in the crowdfunding because they were a little worried that this product could not meet their own requirements in terms of keyboard use. Thanks to Lei Feng.com and Zhiku for giving me a free trial, which gave me a comprehensive experience of using OneBoard Pro+intelligent mechanical keyboard.

Keyboard

Triangle shading design is adopted on the front of the outer package, which is low-key and scientific. The design of Zhiku Logo is a bit interesting. ACOOO is delicately depicted with five triangular patterns, which is highly recognizable.

The reverse side shows the keyboard's In addition to being directly connected to the display as an Android host, it can also be connected to other hosts to achieve switching between two systems.

On the side of the package, in addition to the Zhiku logo and keyboard model, some features of the product are listed, such as one piece switching, free upgrade, etc

When opening the outer package, the first thing I saw was a cushion sponge, and the keyboard protection was in place

The keyboard body is covered with a layer of special key position instructions, which is very considerate

Expose the keyboard

One family photo, including power plug, power cord, HDMI cable, PC Line computer connection cable and instructions in addition to keyboard

The keyboard adopts 83 key position design, and the size is 331mm x 177mm x 31mm, giving consideration to both functionality and portability

The panel is made of 3mm thick aluminum alloy panel, and CNC cutting process is used. The edge radian is handled very well. With the metal logo, the whole keyboard gives a feeling of being tall. The surface of aluminum alloy is smooth and delicate, and the touch is very good.

The keyboard does not have a keyboard bracket, and its height cannot be adjusted. However, due to the high height of the back of the keyboard itself, it has a certain tilt angle and the large front frame can act as a palm rest. It is comfortable to use

The main interfaces of the keyboard are concentrated at the rear, including power interface, HDMI interface, DVI multiplexed PC Line interface, SD card slot, two USB ports for mouse and general purpose, and RJ45 network port. The square area on the far left is the WIFI antenna.

The headphone interface is designed on the left side of the keyboard. The middle frame of the keyboard is made of translucent ABS material, mainly for the cool effect when the light is on

When applying for trial, Lei Feng.com said that it was a black axis. After receiving the keyboard, I felt that it was obviously the feedback of the green axis. When I removed the key cap, I saw that it was a proper Cherry green axis. There are 6 or 7 mechanical keyboards in hand, black, green, tea, red, white and green, Many friends around who are new to mechanical keyboards will ask what axis is suitable for games and what axis is suitable for typing. I think from my experience of using several keyboards alternately, although the characteristics of several axes are different, it is not only a certain axis that can be used for games, but only a certain axis can be used for typing. As long as you adapt to any axis, you can kill it. You should try more before buying, Just choose your favorite feedback feeling.

The large key position uses the satellite axis In terms of the characteristics of the stabilizer bar and the satellite shaft, the stabilizer bar is loud, but has better elasticity, which is easy to remove and difficult to install. The satellite shaft is simple to disassemble and easy to clean, but its elasticity is slightly worse than that of the balance bar. Each has its own advantages. It is unnecessary to distinguish between the high and the low, but Personally, I prefer the feel of the stabilizer bar.

The key cap is made of ABS material, and the surface has a skin like coating. The touch is OK. Since the ABS material is used for oiling, it is inevitable...

The back of the keyboard is made of a whole aluminum alloy plate, and round anti-skid foot pads are designed at four corners. Thanks to the compact weight of the keyboard metal material, the foot pads are small, but the anti-skid effect is good.

Since the machine has built-in Android operating system, there must be chips, which inevitably leads to the heat dissipation problem. The hollowed out LOGO ingeniously solves this problem.

Close up of power supply

The manual details the connection mode of the keyboard

In addition to the built-in Android operating system, another highlight of this keyboard is that it can be chip modularized design, and SOC chips can be upgraded freely by DIY to obtain better performance. At present, the OneBoard Pro+is built with RK3288 ARM chipset, and the SOC version of Intel ATOM Z3735F X86 can be replaced after a special look on the official website, Let's see if it is convenient to disassemble and upgrade.

To open the backplane, remove six hexagonal screws, four of which are hidden under the foot pad

After unscrewing the screws, the backplane can be easily removed without any snap. The black PCB board is very clean and the solder joints are full.

WIFI antenna

SOC RK3288 is used, the CPU part is 4-core A17, the GPU part is ARM Mali-T764, with 2G RAM and 16G ROM, BT4.0， From the configuration point of view, OneBoard Pro+has the ability to compete with mainstream Android phones and tablets. The only pity is that the WIFI part does not support AC.

See the battery socket in the upper right corner? Are PC players familiar? Yes, the BIOS battery on the PC motherboard is useless because the ARM version is pre installed with the Android system. However, if you change the SOC to the X86 version and install the WIN10 system, you must install the battery to maintain the BIOS settings.

OneBoard Pro+ Five different colors of backlight are used to distinguish different functional areas of the keyboard. The backlight brightness is adjustable at 9 levels. At the same time, you can also use Fn+shift to turn off the backlight. Of course, such a bright backlight is unlikely to be turned off by users

Connection mode

The following two connection methods are officially provided

The first is to use the OneBoard Pro+keyboard as an independent Android host. At this time, you only need to connect the power cable, HDMI cable and mouse

The second is to use the OneBoard Pro+keyboard together with the original computer host, which can switch between two systems in real time. At this time, it needs to use an additional PC Line cable to input the host video signal and USB signal to the keyboard end. The specific connection method has been shown clearly in the official diagram, and will not be detailed here

Maybe some friends will ask, I just want to use OneBoard Pro+as an ordinary keyboard instead of using the Android system. If it is too inconvenient to connect so many lines according to the second connection method, is there a simpler connection method? In fact, it can be achieved, but the official did not give a diagram. I changed it according to the official picture, as shown below

Just connect the PC Line to the keyboard and USB at the other end. In the HDMI dual interface, just connect the USB to the computer (the HDMI interface on the PC Line is not connected). The host can output to the display directly using HDMI cable or other DVI, VGA, and DP cables

System experience

OneBoard Pro+ The keyboard will start automatically after being connected to the power supply

The logo of Zhiku first appears after startup, and then some basic settings need to be made before entering the system for the first time

Language settings

Wireless and network settings

Time zone, date and time settings

Display mode setting: full screen, center and vertical screen can be adjusted. After entering the system, it can also be set by pressing F10

most The next step introduces the Android special function keys

Enter the desktop

The operating system is Zhiku OneOS customized based on Android 4.4.2, with some practical apps built in. The whole operation mode is basically mouse instead of gesture sliding. The software installation mode and operation mode are the same as Android. Users familiar with Android are very easy to operate.

The system supports OTA upgrade

In terms of hardware, it has reached the standard of mainstream Android, adopting RK3288, 4-core A17 CPU, ARM Mali-T764 GPU, 2G RAM, 16G ROM, BT4.0， However, it should be noted that theoretically, the RK3288 4-core A17 works at 1.8GHz, but some of the RK3288 CPUs used by OneBoard Pro+only work at 1.4GHz. It is unclear whether the frequency reduction is due to heat dissipation or other reasons.

Not satisfied with running for a minute, 47000+really reached the level of mainstream Android

Android applications running on OneBoard Pro+are the same as running on mobile phones. After a try at QQ, there is no problem with the compatibility of common software such as WeChat. I won't introduce it here. One of the selling points of OneBoard Pro+is to move mobile games to the big screen to get a better game experience.

The big screen of tribal conflict is high. It can be operated by clicking directly with the mouse. It is no longer afraid of the wrong position of the small screen

People can drag and drop the plane with the mouse. Some people feel uncomfortable with the black edge beside it? No problem, use F10 key to rotate the screen, and connect the external display that supports rotation

Is it very powerful

For a game that does not support mouse operation, a key position is required. Zhiku oneBoard Pro+specially designed a program called Wankong, which can freely customize the keyboard keys according to different needs in the game, including clicking, sliding, simulation handle and gravity sense. At the same time, in the games downloaded from Zhiku onePlay store, Zhiku has set the keyboard mapping for the game, which saves the trouble of user setting

Does it feel much better to play Masterspeed 15 on the big screen than on the mobile phone? The best speed car is downloaded directly from the onePlay store. It can be seen that the official has done a key mapping for users. The A and D keys simulate gravity induction, the S key maps to brake, and the space key maps to drift

For games not downloaded from OnePlay store, users can only map by themselves. They tried to escape from the temple 2, mapping the four direction keys to four direction scrolling, and mapping ctrl and alt to gravity sensing left and right shaking tablets to run the game perfectly.

Dual system switching

Dual system switching is the biggest selling point of OneBoard Pro+, and seamless switching between external systems and built-in Android systems can be achieved through the Tai Chi key in the upper right corner

The switching speed is about 3 seconds, which is acceptable. Please refer to the following video for details.

The Taiji key lights up red when switching to the external system, and the green light when switching to the internal system. The figure above shows the win10+Android dual system composed of desktop computer and office use. For office use, the most convenient thing for me is to talk about QQ and listen to music on Android. Due to the nature of the work, the company's computer control is very strict. Only a small amount of Android software in the IT list is allowed on the office computer. The installation of QQ, Kugou, Wangwang and so on is prohibited. With the dual system, it is much more convenient. When talking directly on the Android system QQ, Kugou sounds like Wangwang will buy it...

summary

advantage:

one     High end aluminum alloy panel is of great quality and excellent workmanship

two     five The color backlight is cool

three     It is self-evident that the excellent typing touch brought by the green scroll makes you feel comfortable when you start typing

four     The concept of upgrading CPU and recycling replaced core parts is very advanced, which saves user investment. In addition to the Android version currently launched, there will be a Windows version later, and the availability will be further enhanced

five     The dual system switching function is very practical. It is a powerful tool for office users or heavy mobile players

six     The hardware performance is relatively strong, the running of mainstream games and software is very smooth, and the boot speed is also very fast, taking less than 20s

Disadvantages:

one     As far as the keyboard is concerned, OneBoard Pro+can be improved. Because the palm rest is relatively large and there is no bracket, it is difficult to press the F area. Personally, I suggest changing the F area keycap to R5 height will improve the use comfort.

two     Key cap ABS material is easy to grease

three     The OneBoard Pro+originally came into the market with keyboard disassembly tools and metal Tai Chi keys, but the number of keyboards on hand has been reduced, so it's OK not to give away the disassembly tools. But I think metal keycaps are more attractive for peripheral players, and this cost should not be saved

four     What's the age? It's a little hard to say that WIFI does not support 802.11AC

five     The system still needs to be optimized. The following problems have been encountered during use

①    GFXBench Frequent "out of memory" errors are reported during operation, and the operation is not completed successfully once

②      Some software has poor support for 1080P widescreen, which leads to stretched images. This problem is just a problem for third-party applications. It's not a problem for the system's own Wan apps

③      During the process of listening to music with Baidu Music, the sound of software installation will be stuck randomly

④      The rotating screen of the national airplane game appeared the phenomenon of crash and automatic restart

⑤      There are still limitations in the mapping of keys in the Wankong software. Some operations cannot be mapped perfectly, such as the touch screen operation of the rhythm master, which is left or right after pressing the key, cannot be simulated perfectly

Write at the end

OneBoard Pro+ The keyboard is just a carrier, which means that the desktop has created an entrance for mobile Internet applications and mobile games. For heavy mobile game users, many people have not only satisfied with the limited screen size of mobile phones, but have turned to tablets and even installed Android virtual machines on PCs to obtain better visual experience of games, The appearance of OneBoard Pro+provides mobile users with more convenient control mode and larger screen visual experience; At the same time, for office users like me, whose office computers strictly restrict software installation, OneBoard Pro+perfectly solves the problem of coexistence of office software and private software by using dual system switching. The price of 1699 sounds a little high, but after careful calculation, the price of the mechanical keyboard of Cherry's original blue shaft with the aluminum alloy shell of CNC process plus the RK3288 flat plate is almost the same. What is the market acceptance of such a highly creative product? Let's wait and see.