Making your Android Tablet Run Faster

I have been using my Galaxy Tab 7 Plus for a while now. While it’s not the latest and greatest Android table around, it does its job. I’m able to read, work and play wherever I am and because of the form factor it’s pretty easy to carry around. The problem that I have always have with this android tablet is the slowness, I wasn’t so sure what’s causing the slowness so I did some research and found some ideas and tweaks to make this tablet faster.

So today I’m going to share those tweaks with you so you can enjoy a faster Android tablet experience. If these tweaks work on a 2 year old tablet, then I would think that these would also work on the newer tablets; getting them to run even faster.

Install a New Launcher

This is probably the easiest way to improve the performance almost straight away. I can only speak for Samsung devices, the TouchWiz interface is not the most optimised launcher ever. In fact it’s actually quite resource intensive in my experience. So install one of these launchers (in no particular order) as they are one of the most optimised ones:

• Nova Launcher: Highly customisable launcher yet very optimised in terms of performance. This is one of the most flexible launcher I have used and still use at the moment.
• Apex Launcher: Similar to Nova Launcher this is also highly customisable and fast. I think in terms of performance they are both on par.
• Smart Launcher: This one is quite different to the 2 above. This launcher doesn’t really have a concept of workspaces but more of categories. In any case this launcher feels faster than both Nova and Apex, but it is very different from both of them.

Update Your Android Installation

This should be pretty obvious, but upgrading the Android version does help as the future iterations of the OS focus more on user interface performances.

Root your Device

This isn’t going to speed up your device obviously, but this will allow you to install many different optimisation applications. Rooting these devices these days are quite easy with applications such as FramaRoot which allows us to root our devices without any computers. As always, take good care reading the instructions when rooting to avoid unwanted issues.

Remove Unwanted Default Apps

Tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab comes with some pre-installed applications from Samsung. An example in my case is that this tablet comes with Pulse app pre-installed. While Pulse is pretty cool app, I’m already using Flipboard so I don’t really need this one running in the background. No matter how much I quit this application I can always find it using the task manager trying to do some kind of update.

In any case, apps like this is not needed. So if you already rooted your device, it’s possible to remove it. Just use applications such as Root App Delete, this one is quite easy to use. There are many other apps like these ones of course but I have only used this one.

Install RAM Optimiser App

Another way to increase the tablet’s efficiency is by installing a RAM optimiser. A good application will be able to optimise the RAM management form the Kernel level therefore these kind of applications might need root access. The application that I am using currently is Performance Booster, things are running a bit more fluid since I installed the application.

Install Task Watchdog

Some application can take too much CPU process for prolonged period of time, there are apps that can warn you and even blacklist or automatically kill the rouge app. One of the applications that I am currently using is the Watchdog Task Manager. I hope this post today helps you all with your Android experiences. If you have other tips, please share it below in the comment box for others to learn as well, thanks.

Categorised in: Android, Fun computing, Tools