I bought a cheap 7″ Android tablet recently (don’t worry, it’s not a Chinese one so I won’t throw it away). I was waiting for a Nexus 7 (1st gen) refurb to hit the $100 mark so I could get one as a test/development device, but then Dell had a sale on its Venue 7 for $119 so I got that instead. It’s not terrible, but it’s not as snappy as my Nexus 4 (or Nexus 5). Also I still have an issue where I don’t how to use a tablet for personal use, but that’s another story.

What was neat about a new tablet was that I had a chance to try out Android’s multi-user support. In theory it sounds great when you need to share 1 device in your family, but does it truly work that way? Well the first problem I faced was that it wasn’t enabled in the OS version that shipped with the device (4.2.x). I had to upgrade to 4.3 before that feature was enabled (bad on the part of Dell).

Once I enabled it, it was a disappointment. The apps that are installed are not shared between users, so you would need to install something like Facebook twice. The size of the apps add up. I know that the SD card is different for each user, so any data downloaded by an app is not shared either. If multiple users want to play a game that is a couple of GB? They’ll each have to download the app and the resource files! At least this tablet has expandable storage.

Then I tried restricted profiles. This seems like a great idea to setup a child with a kid-friendly device. You would disable access to the important apps and let them read books or play kid games. I bought a bunch of children books in the past when they were on sale for this very purpose. Now, I was very disappointed to find that while you can give a restricted profile access to some of the apps on your account; if those apps need a license check (whether through Google Play or Amazon app store), they won’t work. That pretty much invalidates most of my kid apps and books.

So the multi-user support sounded great in theory, but I think I’ll stick to having a single user on the tablet now.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, complaining