Speed up your android tablet

After using several mid-range and entry level Android tablets, I’ve become familiar with one striking problem they all seem to suffer from: very slow internal storage.
This problem is especially noticeable on devices such as (some of?) the Coby tablets which have only one CPU core – when applications block on disk I/O, the entire tablet freezes.

A quick fix for this seems to be to add a Micro SD card, and to move all of your applications to it.

The catch: The normal “move app to SD card” feature in Android doesn’t always move the apps to your external SD card. In fact it seems to almost never do that for me. Instead the apps are moved to a separate part of the internal storage.

A great app called Link2SD takes care of that. There’s a small amount of setup you have to do first, by plugging the microSD card into your computer, and then creating two partitions on the card. There are some instructions on the Google Play page for how to do this.

After moving my browser and all of my apps to a new SD card, I’m finding that my tablet is very rarely slow. Web pages open significantly more quickly and the UI has yet to hang even once.

I installed a cheap 4Gb class 4 SanDisk microSD card. I was hoping to find a faster one but my local stores don’t carry anything other than class 4 cards. Turns out, this was just fine!

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