[Europe-focus] If you’re looking closely at the super-cheap Medion S2218 that’s being offered in Aldi in the UK / Ireland today (next week in many mainland EU countries) you’ll want to just check through this – an updating post including reviews and feedback that you need to read before buying.
Update: Mini ‘day 1’ review available at the end of this article.
Medion Akoya S2218 (MD99595)
The first feedback, a video review, comes from Germany. Computerbild.de rated the Medion S2218 3.01 (Grade C in school-speak – acceptable.)
- 7 hours battery.
- Good contrast, not great color accuracy.
- No upgrade possibility.
- No word on keyboard.
- Confirmed fanless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=TsOEidyMbHA
Based on tweets seen from the UK some stores only had one S2218 in stock and customers weren’t happy.
@AldiUK frustrated at turning up at radford rd,coventry before store opens to buy a Medion notebook that there was only 1 available #noluck
— Pete Drummond (@petedrummond666) August 27, 2015
https://twitter.com/dayoo14/status/636815131175972864
Kev Wright of TechtalkUK bought one in Aldi this morning and he reported 5 being in stock.
https://twitter.com/kevwright/status/636799812789227520
Larger Aldi stores have more in stock but with nearly 700 stores in the UK and Ireland you can get an idea of how many will be sold today. Across Europe next week the total sales numbers will probably be between 5000 and 10000 units. (2400 stores in Germany, 180 in Switzerland, 430 in Austria, 80 in Slovenia for example) and it could spread across the whole of the Aldi network. That’s over 10000 stores!
[22:28] @kevwright has done some testing for us and we’ve got this new information to share.
- Touchpad is currently not multi-touch enabled. [Apparently the manual says that it’s multi-touch enabled. There’s hope, via a driver update.]
- Battery capacity 39 Wh (good)
- Connected Standby / Modern Standby – Supported. (Always on mode.)
Do remember that the German version going on sale next week for €239 has 64 GB storage, not 32 GB as in the UK.
[22:39] MarkOne sent in a comment on this post and says: “But what surprised me the Display, it’s one of the best netbook displays which I have seen on the market. Compared to the Asus X205TA its much brighter and the colors are much nicer too.”
We’ve just added the S2218 to our database and will be adding videos and important links as we find them. Specifications are nearly complete now.
[22:44] Battery report (from powercfg command):
Battery report
| COMPUTER NAME | DESKTOP-7JEFTOQ |
| SYSTEM PRODUCT NAME | MEDION Akoya S2218 MD99599 |
| BIOS | 1.00.04.MN IA32 06/30/2015 |
| OS BUILD | 10240.16412.x86fre.th1.150729- |
| PLATFORM ROLE | Slate |
| CONNECTED STANDBY | Supported |
| REPORT TIME | 2015-08-27 20:42:07 |
Installed batteries
| BATTERY 1 | |
| NAME | CMPC |
| MANUFACTURER | ECS |
| SERIAL NUMBER | 123456789 |
| CHEMISTRY | LION |
| DESIGN CAPACITY | 39,065 mWh |
| FULL CHARGE CAPACITY | 39,065 mWh |
[23:03] The eMMC drive (in the UK) is a Hynix HBG4e. Performance test results not available yet. The WiFi module is a Realtek RTL8723BS. (no AC Wifi support. 2.4Ghz band, single channel.) There is no GPS module in the S2218.
[23:07] The sound quality of the speakers is “surprisingly good” (Reported by MarkONE via comment.) It looks like The Akoya S2218 will make a great in-long-flight video player.
To round-up the customer feedback today we’ve got a post from @kevwright in the UK which gives us a mini-review of the Medion Akoya S2218. Mini review here, extracts and comment (with permission) below.
“It is attractive, completely plastic of course, and quite lightweight without being flimsy.” Chippy says: Two people have commented that the unit looks and feels good. This is a great start!
“I have installed only Chrome, and deleted McAfee Live, and have just over 12GB free. I am sure I can delete a few more apps, so you can probably free up a bit more.” Chippy says: I expect that a few GB can be recovered as I’ve heard that there’s a Cyberlink media application pack installed. In Germany, the home country for Aldi and Medion, I expect to see a lot more crapware and that’s probably the reason that you get 64 GB storage, for a few dollars more, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For the first time on Windows, a ‘reset’ will (should) restore the unit to a basic no-crapware build That hasn’t been tested on the S2218 yet though and I know there have been a few issues reported on that topic. If you’re going to use the Windows 10 reset function, take an image first until there are multiple reports that it works.
Kev reports that a 64 GB micro SD card worked and sits flush inside.
“…the best thing about this machine, the display. I was not expecting that much to be honest, but it is very, very nice.” Chippy says: We don’t have brightness figures yet but we’ve heard that the contrast is good. This 1920 x 1080 IPS panel is going to be great for international flight entertainment. “…this screen puts a lot of far more expensive devices to shame, and frankly, it’s as good as my Macbook Air screen” says Kev.
“…using it for several hours straight, and is just a little warm in one spot on the base.”
“The keyboard is pretty good, not too much bounce, and decent spacing. I am writing this completely on the S2218, and not making too many mistakes! One odd thing is that every now and then, the cursor jumps to another part of the Google Doc, and I am typing in the wrong spot. Very odd but probably just me getting used to it.” Chippy says: Mouse-jump is a little red flag for me.
“This trackpad is OK, but at the moment, I can not get it to either scroll web pages or select blocks of text with a two finger tap. It feels as if it needs some sort of driver installing, and I will be investigating this in the next few days.” Chippy says: The manual reports a multi-touch trackpad but two people have reported to me that it’s not working. This could indeed be a driver issue. Update: Driver fix is available. See below.
There’s more in Kevin Wrights mini review here but that rounds-up this post. The Medion Akoya S2218 is looking like a good deal with a strong screen, good battery life and impressive price. Videos and more links will be added to the Medion Akoya S2218 information page here.
One more thing. It seems we’ve found the original manufacturer for the Akoya S2218 in the ECS EF20RA. Spotted at Computex in June by Winfuture (German) and Mobilegeeks (English.) Video embedded below.
28th August. Multiple sources have confirmed that there’s a fix for the trackpad. See this link http://www.medion.com/gb/service/_lightbox/treiber_details.php?did=14621 Thanks Kev, John, Charles.
Great Laptop for the price, the Display is great, only downturn is the touchpad, the Manual is confirming it should support multitouch, but at least for now that not correct. Let’s hope for a driver updated.
There are multitouch setting in Windows 10. Have you checked them? Thanks for the feedback on the keyboard. Any other feedback you have will be helpful. Speakers OK? Build quality?
Hi everyone. I just wanted to chip in regarding the multi-touch issues some users are experiencing. You can download the up-to-date driver that fixes this issue by searching “medio ss2218 touchpad driver” or going to this link http://www.medion.com/gb/service/_lightbox/treiber_details.php?did=14621
extract the files, go to the place that you extracted the files to, run setup.
I was much happier after I discovered it was easily fixed. Although I feel bad about taking the last one in stock ):
I can confirm that this driver update does work and fixes the issue.
I was lucky enough to get one of the two units in my local Aldi and found the correct touchpad driver stored in the laptop’s C:Drivers folder, in a zip file, together with the rest of the system’s drivers. Installed the touchpad driver from there and the full Elan touchpad interface became available in the Mouse control panel and multitouch works correctly and is very configurable.
WOW! What a difference the touchpad driver make to the system! Thanks for the info!
Hi there. The instruction manual states OEM version of operating system is included in box. It isn’t! Does everyone else have this?
The instructions say “Included with your Notebook”, so what they mean is that the notebook comes with the OS installed.
The S2218 has a recovery partition with a backup of the OS, so you can reset the laptop back to shipping condition using Windows built in Recovery/Reset without need for other install media. I have already tried it and it went without a hitch.
I bought one in Ireland and find it quite good. It’s very quiet and quick to boot up. I currently have a 16gb microSD inserted but plan to get a bigger one. I plan to find out how big a microSD I can put into it, I saw a post saying someone has a 64gb one in theirs, but I would like to get a more chunky memory to make it comparable to a real laptop.
I’ve loaded a bunch of OpenSource apps on it, such as OpenOffice, MyPaint, PAINT.NET and GIMP and the seem to run well with the 2gb RAM. I also put BlueStacks on it to have a version of Android available and it runs pretty well.
I wonder about expansion, though, as I haven’t voided the warranty by peaking inside yet. Is it possible to port the OS onto a bigger internal drive? That’s worth investigating.
Anyone had any joy in installing XP or Windows 7/8?
I have installed Linux 15.04 64 bits the following way :
1. based on https://sturmflut.github.io/linux/ubuntu/2015/02/04/installing-ubuntu-on-baytrail-tablets-version-2/
– because the EFI run in 32 bits, we need to add a 32 bit loader bootia32.efi in the folder EFI/BOOT/ of the installation usb key
– after installation, the computer will not boot correctly, the process is :
Reboot the device, with the USB storage medium plugged in.
Wait until the device has booted into GRUB from the USB storage medium.
Hit “c” on the keyboard to drop to the GRUB shell.
Input the following two lines, adapting all device and partition identifiers and kernel versions to your setup (GRUB has autocompletion!):
linux (hd0,gpt5)/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-23-generic root=/dev/mmcblk0p3
initrd (hd0,gpt5)/boot/initrd-3.16.0-23-generic
Boot with the command “boot”.
If the system doesn’t boot, go back to step 1.
Log into the Ubuntu installation.
Connect to the internet using the internal WiFi or your USB network adapter.
Then:
Open a terminal and install the grub-efi-ia32-bin package:
$ sudo apt-get install grub-efi-ia32-bin
Update the grub config:
$ sudo update-grub
Wifi did not work at first. I have first use an older wifi usb key which work with ubuntu.
I have installed the wifi driver found in https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs
After downloading, open a terminal, go to folder and run:
$ make
$ sudo make install
Thanks! That’s good information to have. I tried several different distros and only got as far as a kernel panic. I’ll try this now.
You can try the Debian Multiarch ISO’s as well. They will work!
How is everybody getting on with the S2218… after 2 months. ?
I am content enough with the hardware. I can’t find any other laptop
on the market with this screen resolution at this price point. The
keyboard somehow became loose and needs to be pressed down after
travelling with the laptop. One issue I had is that my installation got
corrupted following a WIndows 10 update and recovery from the recovery
partition failed. As I eventually found, with all Baytrail systems, it
is impossible to satisfactorily run any other operating system or to
even use a stock image of windows 10 downloaded from MIcrosoft. I have
receipts and I could send it in under warranty but that timescale wont
work for me right now.
I’m hobbling along under a
stock installation of Windows 10 and Ubuntu 15.04 right now, both face
the same issues regarding a lack of hardware support. In fact, I would
be grateful if someone with this laptop could email me or post a link to
a recovery image.
The issue I faced with Windows update was likely due to my particular software and settings so I don’t blame the laptop.
We can’t get the the touchpad to “click” on anything – we can use it to navigate round the screen but when we select something nothing happens so we need to use an external mouse!! We have contacted Medion but apparently they don’t have the correct drivers to fix this problem!
Has anyone else had this problem and if so, do you know how to fix it?
Hi I am having trouble starting my S2218 anyone have the same trouble ? Any suggestions?
Don’t know what exactly happens when you try to switch on the laptop of course… but opening the case and disconnecting/connecting the ‘BIOS’ battery helped me once.
I have lost the booklet that came with my laptop – can anyone give me the helpline number?