Powered OTG hub

Unboxing was an exciting affair where I opened a box. I can't post photos to the Reg's forums so you'll just have to imagine the sheer thrill of receiving a small cardboard box from Amazon and then opening it.

Woohoo.

There's a lot in the box. A Prime Instant Video 30 Day Trial bit of spam, a very small instruction manual, the hub itself, a small power brick, a UK plug, a male-to-male USB cable, a microUSB->USB Female OTG cable, a USB Male to microUSB male cable.... yeah, I think that was all.

The hub has a slightly unusual config. On the "back" (which I kept facing me at me at all times) are, from left to right, a power button, the power input socket (proprietary), a USB IN port (that one confused me but let's go with it), three USB 2 female ports and two further USB Female ports specifically designated as charging ports, one for each common voltage. On the left-hand side (from my preferred "back" view) is an SD Card slot and another slot, probably some camera thing. Ididn't bother with those.

The microUSB charging/peripherals port on the Asus Vivotab Note 8 is, annoyingly, on the top of the device so I did not use at as a dock because duh. Instead, I plugged the OTG cable into the tablet, plugged the M->M USB cable into the OTG F port and the other end into the USB IN port.

I filled out the non-powered USB ports with an MS Intellimouse Explorer 2 and an MS Keyboard because a) knock MS software all you like but their peripherals are always reliable and b) I'm trying to load Windows 10 so giving it hardware it probably knows about seemed like a good idea.

The final port was filled with a SanDisk 8GB USB key loaded with the Win10 x86 ISO and made bootable.

The tablet recognised the mouse and keyboard immediately and without loading drivers. It also loaded the thumb drive without issue but, as rebooting to UEFI proved, still refused to boot from the damned thing.

It may be that the hub had not loaded (although UEFI certainly responded to the keyboard so that seems dubious) or it could just be Asus' annoying BIOS.

So I have to report that the hub works well and exactly as advertised. It seems a solid little piece of hardware, potentially toddler-proof though I'm not eager to test this.

If you're interested, I did manage to load Win10 but only by booting into Win8.1 and actually running setup.exe from the thumbdrive. Once that had done its thing, I was surprised to find that an in-place upgrade had occurred (this had failed from MS's internet-based upgrader several times) and everything seemed to work.