Where to start when you get your Kurio 7

The basics on how to un-Kurio your tablet.

Maybe you bought this as a gift for your kid? Maybe you bought it on Craigslist for super cheap, either way, I'm about to take that ugly looking kid software crap disappear forever.

This is a guide on how to heavily configure your Kurio tablet, so you don't ever have to see that crappy home screen stuff again.

First thing is first, your tablet will be a big hassle to activate, go through the instructions on activation and complete all that mumbo jumbo. Then when that's done head over to the settings and look for the boot to android selection or feature.

Boot into regular Ice Cream Sandwich, now you have a somewhat normal looking tablet, or so it seems.

Your tablet will slip right back into Kurio protection when you reboot next. Unless...

Go into your applications, then hit the All tab, find the Kurio app, "Disable" it.

Then find and Disable anything else you don't want to see on there, maybe its the kids games, or the dumb features thrown in, whatever you want, note, some things just will not disable, but root fixes all that.

Now, reboot your tablet, just in case you did something wrong. If it reboots back to android, woot good job!

A few tweaks I made to get as far away from Kurio as I could

1. Changed my lock screen to off, the kurio two finger lock is just too buggy
2. Disabled anything and everything I could pertaining to Kurio, etc, games, apps
3. Rooted my tablet, and allowed installing of 3rd party apps

What's Next?

Now that you know your tablet a little better, there are a few unfortunate things you don't want to know about your tablet.

Kurio has their devices in a sort of pickle, when connecting to the Google Play store, your tablet tells Google that it is a piece of garbage that can't play basically any games. That isn't true, so don't worry. But this is still a problem for me and I have no way around it, "sideloading" apps is the only way to go about this to be honest.

Sideloading, is a method other than directly from Google Play to get apps, you can get the Amazon app store, you can download APKs of what you wanted to install to the device, but you will most likely not be able to get the games you wanted from Google Play.

I personally get the games I want by using APKs. I buy a lot of games from Google Play, so I have a unique way of doing this. My phone plays almost any games available on Google Play, my GPU is great. So if the game is a free game, I use something called APK Downloader, you can find it with Google. What APK downloader lets you do is it will take the Device ID off of another device and set it up in an extension in Google Chrome, to download that APK, but it will not work with paid apps!

For paid apps, I download the application fully to my phone, then I get an app called AirDroid, to wireless transfer the APK to my PC, it has a very easy to use interface that anyone can understand. You can also manually transfer the APK files from your system files on your other device with a file manager (Astro File Manager, etc).

The rest is just for kicks.

Here are a few cool things to do with your Kurio 7 if you want to learn a bit about the technology you're using.

1. That USB dongle it comes with? You can hook up a flash drive to that, and play movies from it. You can even hook up a mouse to it. Yes, you can use your own USB mouse and keyboards on android, your tablet IS a computer, and a lot of people seem to not understand that.
2. Put a bigger SD card in it, it will hold more games.
3. Watch Netflix on it, it's probably the best use so far.

Thats it!

Good Luck!