I'm completely new to Android and tablets but I have recently acquired (free gift) an Alcatel Onetouch Pixi 3 (8) tablet running Android 5.1.1. I know it isn't the best or fastest and have had to delete and re-install stuff on it twice now as by the time Android is running there is only 4Gb of storage left for apps. I set it to save these to the SD card but it still insists on putting some of them in main memory. But, I figured it would do for my two main uses for it, running a radio station app (PlanetRock) so I can connect the headphone socket to my car stereo line in and keeping track of my expenses when driving through Europe.

The language is set for English (UK) but as soon as I get into France and am connected to a French network, the default language changes to French. This doesn't affect the radio station app but I also use Excel for the expenses and that also changes to French. If I change the language back to English (UK) in Settings, Excel remains in French. At one point it was in French but when I went in to the language settings, it told me that Langue was Anglais (UK)???? How can I lock the language so it doesn't change when I move to a different country?

Second problem is that I can have Excel open and enter my data as I need to but as I also have the radio station app open, I need to show that. When I want to enter data in Excel, I touch the bottom right square to show open apps, touch Excel and it opens but it doesn't open as I last left it, it seems to re-open from scratch with data previously entered missing. I've now been told that I am opening recently used, and not open, apps and as it only has 1Gb of RAM, it has booted Excel out of memory. Is there any way around this?

Is it possible to have two 'live' apps running at once so I can switch between the two or do I just revert to my previous method of writing expenses on a scrap of paper and updating the Excel spreadsheet later?

Not sure whats going on with the language switching.

older versions of android didnt handle multi-tasking very well, i think it only really got better around 6 or 7. Before then, the application was killed when tasks were switched and the app itself had to deal with the recovery.

You might find you can install a newer version of android via a route like Cyanogenmod, but realistically given the limited hardware i suspect you'll be struggling. 1GB of ram really isnt enough for modern android, never mind multitasking, and it sounds like it only has 8gb of storage, which like you say, gets almost immediately filled up by the time the OS has run all of its updates etc.

The only solution is a better spec tablet i imagine, ideally one with at least 2gb ram and 16gb of storage

That's what I was thinking but as this was a freebie and a decent spec 4G/Wifi tablet isn't cheap, I think I've just got to live with it's shortcomings. It runs BBC iPlayer (through Hola VPN so it thinks I'm in the UK) and Mobdro so lets me watch TV on it when I'm out of the country and the battery life seems pretty good too (probably because it is such low spec). The language thing is really annoying though. My phone changes to local time when I'm abroad but not the language too. Oddly, it seems to be a French thing as I don't remember it changing to Latvian when I was there over new year.

Gilbertd wrote:

That's what I was thinking but as this was a freebie and a decent spec 4G/Wifi tablet isn't cheap, I think I've just got to live with it's shortcomings. It runs BBC iPlayer (through Hola VPN so it thinks I'm in the UK) and Mobdro so lets me watch TV on it when I'm out of the country and the battery life seems pretty good too (probably because it is such low spec). The language thing is really annoying though. My phone changes to local time when I'm abroad but not the language too. Oddly, it seems to be a French thing as I don't remember it changing to Latvian when I was there over new year.

Battery on tablets tends to be a lot better I've found - I've had a few and even the 4g ones manage to last for days if not doing alot (far better than the phone manages which does get a hammering by comparison). Though obviously theres more space in a tablet to have a battery of a bigger capacity.

Do you actually need the French language on the tablet? I've not got an Android 5 device handy, but going into settings/Language & Keyboard/Language shows the installed ones, you should be able to remove French (if its installed, though would expect it to be if your finding it changing to French) and that might stop it.

It may be something specific to the MS office apps that is doing it though?

It may be something specific to the MS office apps that is doing it though?

If you look in the settings on Excel (click the bit showing your name if your signed into the app then settings) there is a setting for enable locally relevant content. It might be worth switching that off to see if it helps? (would have looked earlier but a corrupted memory card last week has removed excel and a load of other stuff from the phone i had to hand, and required redownloading).

I can't see anything else there that even might cause it.

BrianH wrote:

Do you actually need the French language on the tablet? I've not got an Android 5 device handy, but going into settings/Language & Keyboard/Language shows the installed ones, you should be able to remove French (if its installed, though would expect it to be if your finding it changing to French) and that might stop it.

That would explain why it didn't change when I was driving through Poland, Lithuania and into Latvia, it doesn't have Polish, Lithuanian or Latvian installed. It does have French and quite a few others I have absolutely no need for but how do I remove them?

Gilbertd wrote:

BrianH wrote:

Do you actually need the French language on the tablet? I've not got an Android 5 device handy, but going into settings/Language & Keyboard/Language shows the installed ones, you should be able to remove French (if its installed, though would expect it to be if your finding it changing to French) and that might stop it.

That would explain why it didn't change when I was driving through Poland, Lithuania and into Latvia, it doesn't have Polish, Lithuanian or Latvian installed. It does have French and quite a few others I have absolutely no need for but how do I remove them?

Its not obvious, but if you tap the menu button at the top right (assuming yours looks like that being 5.x) then you should see remove, select that then you should be able to tick the one you want to remove (or more than one if needed). I've only got English on my list.

Hmm - Just had a thought that my other tablet might have older android, and it does have 5.1.1 on that. Doesn't seem it works in the same way as 7

Off topic a bit, my inexpensive LG phone reports it's running out of storage space, emails no longer work on it. I haven't installed anything, I regularly download and and delete camera pictures etc from it but it came with lots of pre-installed apps that I don't use, many of which have automatically downloaded multiple updates. it's the app updates I believe have sapped storage space but it won't let me delete apps or revert to pre-update versions. A memory card wouldn't do any good as email and apps use internal storage space... Any ideas?

This is the classic problem with third party bloatware :(
The best option is to get a Nexus/Pixel phone which is "pure" Android with no bloatware.
Or just get a phone with loads of storage and/or an SD card. You can move most apps that you've downloaded to the memory card and keep all photos/movies on there too which makes things easier. Moving apps to SD is a matter of going down the apps list and moving them individually - a bit of a chore.

Thanks Miles, I'll try to shift apps to an SD card if you reckon it's possible with the LG?

I did a complete re-install on the tablet and found that even though I'd set the SD card as the default location for downloads, it still put some into the internal memory. I was able to install an app and then move it but not if I installed a number of them so the internal memory was getting full. If I tried that the Move to SD card button was enabled but once poked it became greyed out with Moving shown. No matter how long I left it, it still didn't move. There's loads of bloatware loaded but it won't let me uninstall them, only stuff I've downloaded myself. You are right about the updates, with a clean install it has a decent amount of the 4Gb remaining after Android has loaded but once it has updated everything then that is down to about 400Mb. Should there be any way to turn updates off?

Brian, there's no menu button at top right on the languages screen, just a magnifying glass to allow me to search (although quite why I would want to search for a language when they are listed on the screen in alphabetical order). Probably something that was improved in later versions of Android.

Bit of a basic tablet but not the worse. You would be able to do far greater things with root access and a custom rom. Depends how confident you are messing about although it's not difficult. Rooting will enable you to get rid of all the bloatware as they are installed as system apps. Gain root access and then get a system app uninstaller from the playstore. With root, you can put apk's where you like with a bit of fiddling. Not sure if your tablet has an sdcard slot, but if it does, you can gain more RAM by creating a swap file.

All info here

blueplasticsoulman wrote:

Bit of a basic tablet but not the worse. You would be able to do far greater things with root access and a custom rom. Depends how confident you are messing about although it's not difficult. Rooting will enable you to get rid of all the bloatware as they are installed as system apps. Gain root access and then get a system app uninstaller from the playstore. With root, you can put apk's where you like with a bit of fiddling. Not sure if your tablet has an sdcard slot, but if it does, you can gain more RAM by creating a swap file.

All info here

I accept that it's basic or it wouldn't have been given away as a freebie! Rooting sounds like something randy animals do so I've no idea how it relates to a tablet..... Yes, it does have an SD card slot and I've put a 32Gb card in there. Some apps installed to that, the odd one has been moved to there but others flatly refuse to move (or say they are moving but never do) even though it tells me there's 25Gb free. The info you linked to may as well be written in Chinese for all the sense it makes to me I'm afraid.

Is there any way of turning off updates? There seems very little point in filling the memory up with updates for stuff I'm never going to use anyway, so even if they can't be removed they can at least be made as innocuous as possible.

Rooting gives root access to the tablet thus allowing you to be able to change or allow changes to be made to anything. As you've found, some apps can be moved to sd card but some can't. This is usually down to the ROM (firmware) on which the device is running and whether moving of apps is allowed by the developer. Android Marshmallow and onwards allows you to adopt the SD card as internal storage. You can do it on Lollipop (android 5.0) but you'll need root access and an app such as link2sd.

Android 6.0 comes with the new Google assistant which will quite happily translate Chinese or most other languages for that matter to English.

I'd say your options would be:

Root the device
Get another device with larger internal storage and a newer version of android.
Live with what you can do with your current device.

I'm thinking along the lines of the latter. It does most of what I want it to do although the language changing trick is what is really annoying and it looks like I can't delete the languages I don't use (like all of them except English....). It was a freebie from O2, all I pay is a tenner a month for the SIM, so I might try phoning them and seeing if they will swap it for something else at minimal cost.

Rooting is the Android version of Jailbreaking an iThing.
Once you've done that you have the option to install a different version of Android, specifically one without the cr@p the tablet manufacturers or mobile phone operators put on there to "Add Value" (to their own share price).
If you have a popular device, you'll have more options.

Or, you could look at a different device entirely. I got one of these (in 7") for the lad at Christmas. I only paid about £40 from John Lewis for it. It has an SD slot and Android 6.0 - although it won't be getting updated to 7 if that matters to you.

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/review/android-tablets/lenovo-tab3-android-tablet-hands-on-review-3635416/

So far it has coped very well.

Gilbertd wrote:

Is there any way of turning off updates? There seems very little point in filling the memory up with updates for stuff I'm never going to use anyway, so even if they can't be removed they can at least be made as innocuous as possible.

I'd suggest the following might be a good idea -
Do the factory reset on the tablet, as that will probably sort the moving to SD card issue
Disable the apps you don't ever want to use (Facebook for example is one that comes with a load of updates) as disabling should stop them updating as well (delete their data first if you haven't reset it, or allowed them to update once you reset it).

You can change the updating settings overall, I think you should be able to set them to update over wifi only and oncharge only if not already doing that, not sure you can actually disable them completely.

If it still won't play, then the custom ROM/Rooting it might be the way to go to get rid of some of the rubbish they come preinstalled with and allow a bit more flexibility. Only thing to be aware of there is some apps won't run if its rooted (Mostly banking apps so probably not a major issue for you anyway), Not personally done that but sounds like BPSM has done it before.

Gilbertd wrote:

I'm thinking along the lines of the latter. It does most of what I want it to do although the language changing trick is what is really annoying and it looks like I can't delete the languages I don't use (like all of them except English....). It was a freebie from O2, all I pay is a tenner a month for the SIM, so I might try phoning them and seeing if they will swap it for something else at minimal cost.

It sounds similar to the Vodafone tablet I've got - which is handy as its a smaller size (so easier to chuck in a bag etc) but just doesn't match upto the usability of the Samsung Tab A that I now also have. Samsung is £17 a month with 20gb data from Three for me, the Vodafone one is £10.38 a month with 2gb. Think all i had to pay for either was delivery beyond the monthly subscription cost.

Its possible to get a wifi hotspot with a data sim inside it, though not sure how you'd find usage abroad with those.

The other thought I've had is if Google sheets would be any better from the expenses side - it might be worth a try (it at least loads a lot quicker than the excel app does). I'd suspect the automatic updating of the language is down to it seeing a different mobile operator - Does the time get updated as you move around? If so it may be worth trying switching that setting off to see if it stops it changing (there isn't anything languague wise in the same part of the settings, I've looked!)

At least you can use the Filllpg app now!

Jailbreaking is just as much a mystery as rooting. I started out on MS-DOS, progressed to Windows 3.11, then 95 and finally ended up with 7. My phone has always been a Nokia so the current one runs Windows 8.1 and my work phone until recently was a Blackberry which was an ergonomic disaster but worked. Then they changed out work phones to Samsung J5s on Android which was the first time I'd even seen Android. They were a complete disaster as the Samsung/Android security wouldn't talk to our work network security so after only a month they were swapped for iPhones. That was about 4 months ago and I'm still getting my head around using that! People may knock Windows but I don't have a problem with it and it does what I tell it to, it lets me uninstall anything I don't want installed which it seems Android won't.

I looked at the Lenovo one and also this https://www.svp.co.uk/asus-zenpad-z580c-8in-tablet-black-intel-174-atom-169-z3530-32-gb-android-6-0-marshmallow.html?___SID=U then realised there's a problem with both, no SIM slot, only Wi-Fi. There aren't that many hotspots when driving through rural Europe......