HooToo HT-WK01 Wireless Keyboard review

With so many productivity apps available for tablets and smartphones, as well as online services like Google Docs or Office 365, there’s never been a greater demand for physical keyboards. Trying to type on a touchscreen keyboard can often be an exercise in frustration, due to the lack of tactile feedback from your keystrokes. HooToo’s HT-WK01 is a wireless keyboard that aims to alleviate some of these problems.

Only 3.8mm at its thickest point, it’s easy to throw in a bag alongside your tablet. At 260x135mm it’s around the size of a compact tablet and is made from a combination of aluminium and plastic. It felt strong enough to withstand some bumps.

There’s no feet to adjust the typing angle, but we found it was naturally tilted to a comfortable degree thanks to the extra thickness at the back to accomodate the 800mAh lithium-ion battery. The keyboard charges via Micro USB, so you might be able to use the same charger as your smartphone or tablet to save carrying around two. 

You get about 200 hours of battery life from a single charge, but you’ll get less if you opt to turn on the backlight. It’s nice to have the option if you want to type in low light conditions, and there are seven colours to cycle between.

The HooToo WK01 pairs over Bluetooth with Android, iOS or Windows devices, and doing so requires you to put it into pairing mode using a button found underneath the keyboard. You then need to type in a passcode displayed on your paired device’s screen. 

The chiclet keys are comfortably spaced, even though the overall size of the keyboard is so small. The keys themselves are low-profile, but had a reasonable amount of travel to them and noise was minimal. 

The only minor annoyances were how the Fn and Ctrl keys were swapped around from what we were used to, and the backslash key that has been moved to above the return key. Otherwise the layout was sensible for a keyboard of this size and you quickly get used to it. There are also various useful shortcuts for the browser, media controls, screen brightness, volume and locking the screen, which we liked. 

The HooToo WK01 is very reasonably priced and is a great choice if you need to edit documents on your smartphone or tablet and certainly a superior alternative than using an onscreen touch keyboard. We just wish it came with a protective pouch of some kind for transporting it around.