The MIIX300 is a little beast. From the hardware point of view most of it is really nice – the display, the case, the keyboard etc. All good quality compared to the low price – I paid 239€ new, incl. taxes. But the hardware has issues. One design issue seems to be in the keyboard stand. It is connected to the tab itself by a seven position connector mounted in the tilting mechinism which makes the device, when connected, to feel like a regular laptop computer. Nice! But the connector and its mechanics is not very sturdy, when opened and if you tilt it a little it looses the connection. The keyboard base unit contains not just the keyboard but also a touchpad and two USB-A host ports. So if you tilt the while thing the USB connection to those four USB devices can get lost! Which is pretty annyoing if your have e.g. a mass storage connected and mounted!

Besides this I am struggeling getting a decent kernel setup. Following issues are still to be solved:

• No sound – the Baytrail DAI is detected but has issues with the codec / firmware / whatever
• No Wifi / Bluetooth – the SDIO connected RTL8723BS is not officially supported by Linux yet, though there is an unofficial driver on GITHUB, https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs
• No LCD backlight control yet – ACPI reports a backlight device, but it does not work, the i915 backlight driver complains that the PWM chip is already taken
• No battery gauge – there is an ACPI battery power device but it does not report any sane values
• No standby power mode – ACPI S3 (aka suspend-to-ram) is not supported, the device only supports „freeze“ in /proc/sys/power/state. Freezing half way works, almost everything powers down but the display backlight but it does not wake up again. Something happens when pressing a key but that’s it.
• No cameras – both integrated cameras do not show up. I would have expected them to be USB devices but they are not. Or they ae and need to be activated by a GPIO before showing up?
• No power-button or volume-buttons action – though they used to work as enter, up, down keys in an older Grub version they are currently not reporting any key events in Linux (kernel 4.4.4)

This is a pretty miserable summary. My currenty plan is to get hold of some kernels for Android (5+) devices based on the same Intel Atom Z3735F.

Currently I am not yet convinced that I really want to keep that device. It turns out to become much more work than I anticipated. I hoped for standard Intel based hardware, working almost out of the box but this turns out to become a major hacking quest for which I currently have no time, oh oh 🙂

It seems that the hardware is pretty much the same as the hardware of the Lenovo MIIX3 tablet for which another good Linux summary page exist, here.