So I bought a truly Chinese – but surprisingly good tablet from this store a few days ago.

Upgrading the firmware

The first thing I noticed that the Users menu was missing from Settings, so I couldn’t create a user for my wife. When I ordered the tablet I was sure I need to hack something so I instantly began with updating the firmware to the latest one which I downloaded from here.

I have a V4 tablet, you can check your hardware version by looking at the serial number’s 9th and 10th character. There was an installer inside the zip which had the Windows software and drivers for the tablet. There was a Chinese .doc about updating the firmware but luckily I found it translated to English here (V989 Brush ENG Tutorial.docx).

Rooting

After “brushing” (or whatever they call fw upgrading) I rooted the tablet using this tool. First I had to copy update.apk and ondaos_V989_Root.zip to the tablet, then I installed the apk, launched the Update application and started the Local Update using the zip file.

Enabling multiple users

I used this build.prop editor which is a very comfortable tool for editing that text file. I had to add this line to the file (without the line number of course):

I saved the file and rebooted the tablet, and the Users menu popped up in the Settings.

Changing the usernames and profile pics

If I try to open the profile settings of a user the Settings app quits unexpectedly, so I had to edit each users’ XML file in the directory /data/system/users/ to change their names. I used ES File Editor for editing the XMLs as it supports root mode. As the user profile files get overwritten at reboot, I had to change the permissions of the files to read only.

I replaced the profile picture PNGs too (for example the user with ID 0 has the pic at /data/system/users/0/photo.png). I used images with a size of 256×256 pixels.