I purchased a used Asus Memopad Smart 10 (ME301T) tablet recently as an upgrade from a 7″ and later 8″ tablet, mainly to help my eyes out with a larger screen.  Though released in 2013, it is currently still being sold but looks like it will be replaced by the Zenpad 10.  Upgrading from the Memopad 8, additional features include a charging LED on the power button and a micro HDMI port.  As a downgrade, the tablet was running Android 4.2 Jellybean.  My biggest issue with Jellybean was the inability to remove empty home screens though a different launcher would allow this.

After doing a factory wipe, I noticed that the touchscreen was occasionally unresponsive.  Swipes and taps had troubles registering which was verified by enabling “Show Touches” in debugging mode.

I decided to upgrade to a custom ROM which supported Kitkat 4.4 to see if performance could be improved.

After a lot of searching, I was able to piece together a procedure to unlock the bootloader, load the TWRP bootloader (which allows backup, restores and installs), and then load the Kitkat ROM.  See procedure here.

With Kitkat, the touchscreen performance was slightly better but the problem still persisted.  I finally found a fix which involved forcing an update of the digitizer firmware here.  I had to image back to the original Jellybean OS.  Remove the back cover.  Disconnect the digitizer/touchscreen flex cable.  Reboot and wait for it to update the touch firmware and interrupt it by unplugging the battery cable.  Plug the flex cable and battery back in and reboot again.

I still had one final problem with touches sometimes not being recognized which I traced to the Facebook app.  It is a big RAM hog and closing it does not remove it from memory.  It had to be uninstalled for my tablet to function smoothly.

See my tips for tweaking Kitkat here.