Impressions: Lenovo MIIX 2 10

A while back my main eroge machine, the Chuwi Minibook, broke — the power light wouldn’t come on anymore. Since the warranty on that thing was almost up, I contacted the support lady to see if I could get it repaired. But nobody bothered to answer me for about two months, right up until I’d given up.

Then the email came!

She said it could be repaired, and explained the part I’d been worried about. I’d heard Chuwi’s after-sales was garbage — basically they just reinstall the OS and ship it back — but it seems crowdfunded products aren’t treated that way.

Of course, I also found out why there’d been no reply for two months: the lady who’d been answering had quit, and they hadn’t hired anyone in those two months…

Fine. In the end the machine got sent off, and I had no Windows machine on hand.

That’s when I spotted what looked like a Lenovo Windows tablet in my wife’s inventory. The model was Lenovo MIIX 2 10, and it even came with a keyboard. So I asked if I could borrow it.

“Sure, whatever. That’s your mother-in-law’s computer, seems like it’s been abandoned for ages.”

So I picked up this Lenovo MIIX 2 10 and kept playing Gal.

I’ve used it for about two weeks now, and I’ve got a fair few impressions, so let me run through them:

• First, the battery life is seriously impressive. Sure, this thing has 2GB of RAM and a garbage ATOM Z3745 CPU, and it can only run 32-bit Win10 LTSC, but the battery life is really something. I basically charge it once and it lasts me a whole day. Coming from the beat-up Chuwi with its 4-hour battery and a Surface Pro 4 with 3 hours, I just couldn’t adjust — I’d guess this thing gets about 6–8 hours.
• The screen colors are good. It’s a 10-inch panel, but apparently it’s still DC dimming, and the colors don’t skew blue. Brand-name machine, I guess. Touch response is fine too, at least a bit better than most no-name tablets. Most importantly, this tablet is actually 1920x1200 — I remember ATOM tablets back in the day were all uniformly 1280x800.
• Performance is basically enough. Most Galgames are fine; Asa Project’s run okay, but the CUFFS stuff doesn’t — obvious stuttering, and that “Kagura family’s eroge shop” one drops frames outright. Still… not a big deal, it’s playable. You can even keep Chrome open in the background scrolling Twitter.
• One of the speakers is broken. The tablet claims JBL stereo, but unfortunately I can’t experience it, because one of the two big speakers is dead — only one makes sound and it’s quiet, no idea why. Though when you attach the external keyboard, the keyboard has speakers too, and those sound okay.
• The keyboard layout is bizarre. I mentioned the keyboard earlier, and I really have to say it’s awful to use. I tried typing and the typo rate was very high, because the key positions are weird — qwer sits where 1234 normally is, different from a regular keyboard, since they crammed in an extra button. You mis-hit constantly, and the keys are tiny, so typing is miserable. Anyway, I don’t want to touch that damn keyboard at all; it took me ages to type 50 characters…

• The only USB port is on the keyboard. Yep, the keyboard is garbage, but you have to use it anyway, because the tablet itself has no USB port — the only one is on the keyboard… I don’t know if the MicroUSB on the tablet supports OTG, but compared to most tablets having their own USB port, this design is pretty stupid.
• The headphone jack is in the bottom-left corner. I don’t need to say much about this. Just imagine holding the tablet playing a Galgame with headphones plugged into the bottom-left corner. Uncomfortable, right? Most of the time I flipped the tablet upside down so the jack was at the top-right.

All in all, this beat-up tablet was probably a decent product back in its day. At least the battery life is long enough, and the ridiculously good 1920x1200 resolution alone is enough. If the speaker weren’t broken, I think it’d be pretty good for playing Galgames.

And of course, my Chuwi Minibook came back from repair today too, so this beat-up tablet can go back to its dust-collecting inventory slot.