Today I received my (2nd try) docking station for the Thinkpad Tablet 10 (TPT10). The first one I ordered a few weeks ago had a broken HDMI port and thus was not fully useful for me so I returned it. The price is a little hefty, I paid 109€, but I think it is worth it. Quality is good and it comes with its own power supply – which is the same as for the newer Lenovo thinkpad laptop computers. The dock is the same as for the Thinkpad Helix hybrid laptops, mine is called „LENOVO ThinkPad Tablet Dock (EU1)“, part number 4X10H04503

The dock contains a bunch of USB devices:

• USB 3.0 HUB with three external USB 3.0 ports, good for harddisks etc.
• USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter, for fast network traffic
• USB audio adapter with powerful headphone jack and built-in microphone. This is pretty useful for me since I still have not figured out how to make the Baytrail audio work (and probably never will 🙁

All USB devices work more or less out of the box. Today I needed to manually probe the usb audio driver, strange.

The external HDMI port also works as expected. Using an external screen, keyboard and harddisk turns this small machine into a pretty nice workstation – powerful enough for the day-to-day office work and even compiling kernels 🙂 I am now running kernel 4.6.2 and am pretty satisfied with the results. The nastiest missing piece, for me, is the missing battery indicator. I never know when the battery will run flat which leaves me with a pretty bad feeling using the device without AC.