I was hesitant about buying a Digitone because, from reading the manual, it appeared that you could use an external MIDI keyboard to input notes for live recording but not for grid recording.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that you can indeed grid record using an external keyboard. I think it would be wise for Elektron to amend the manual to show this (as does the Digitakt manual).
Oh, if my Digitone does this because it is faulty, you are not getting it back 