Driver

The driver for the Mionix Wei, as well as the Castor and Naos mice, is aptly named the Mionix Hub, and the latest version, 1.50 when I reviewed this keyboard, can be downloaded be downloaded here. You choose the OS and installer downloads accordingly, with the device's latest firmware also available for download next to it. The installer is 40.5 MB in size, and the installed driver takes up 124 MB. System utilization is minimal, although installation really presents no options whatsoever and assumes you agree to whatever terms of service Mionix has, which is not okay at all. I did bring this up with Mionix and will update the review if anything changes.


You are prompted to run the driver after installation, and it opens to a window not occupying the entirety of my 4K display. That said, it was large enough due to good scaling with the OS's native settings for it not be an issue. The driver does briefly mention that no devices are connected before it recognizes the keyboard, and this happens every single time. The first time you run it with the keyboard connected, you are asked to select the keyboard's layout so as to customize the virtual keyboard you see on screen.

As with any new device and driver, the first thing I did was to see if it needed a firmware update and it did. I downloaded the firmware file and moved it to the install directory (although you can also just navigate to it in the window that pops up) and initiated the process. As seen by the video-capturing footage in real time, it takes a lot longer than expected, and this is building up towards a slow driver in general, especially with the connection taking long enough to display an error message every single time the driver is run. The firmware update went through without a hitch, and on the plus side, I did not have to disconnect and reconnect the keyboard as with some other drivers and keyboards.

Now that everything is good to go, we can see that the Mionix Hub is quite minimal in terms of what you can do - at least with the Wei keyboard. You can create a maximum of five software profiles, which are not stored on the device. These profiles can not be associated with an application, although you can use the Fn + F1-F5 hotkeys to switch between them via the keyboard as well. Key assignment is via the virtual keyboard seen, and here too are not very many options. You can have the default setting, including for the seven extra keys, or remap these as per the other options seen. These include a single keystroke other than the default, a key sequence, which is really Mionix's macro setting, though very simple as seen in the video above, and multimedia options, which are honestly best left to the dedicated settings already or disabled entirely. There are really only two useful options here - remap the keyboard so you can choose something other than QWERTY as a typing layout and use some macros on keys you do not use often. To be fair, these are the two options I was looking for as far as key assignment goes, and anything else is just a bonus on top, so Mionix does what it had to here. Oh, you can also enable N-key rollover here, which is not on by default.

Backlighting is a big part of the keyboard, but again, the software controls offered here are not extensive. There is a single multicolor dynamic lighting effect, the Rainbow, which is an RGB wave that travels from left to right. The Footsteps and Explosion options in the middle are reactive typing lighting effects where you can choose the single color among the 16.8 M available for the effect, but these do not transition between different colors. Ditto with Breathing mode is hopefully self explanatory, though I do have videos of each on the next page. You can change the brightness via a total of four options (Off, Low, Medium, and High), but the driver is slow to respond due to lag issues, which really affects the user experience as seen in the video above. There were multiple times were I thought I had moved the slider for brightness, or even during the color's selection, but it had not registered and had the same loading animation/lag.

The custom option brings up two modes, both of which are static effects. Here, you can do per-key lighting by selecting individual keys by holding down Ctrl, using the mouse to select a group of keys, or de-select keys by clicking on them and then applying the color of your choice. There are some pre-selected color options here which are all lighter to again go with the concept behind the Wei. There is no apply button, and you simply click outside to get it done. Gradient mode creates a gradient of colors between two end points you get to choose, as well as the position relative to the middle of the chosen keys to where the gradient shift begins.

Mionix Hub is a decent start, but there is still a long way to go before Mionix can hope to use the driver as a strong marketing feature against the competition. Optimizing it to remove the lag inherent to most steps would be the first fix I would want to see, following which they can focus on adding more customization options, whether functional or aesthetic.