I’ve been looking for a good, $200-or-less, 8” Android tablet for my wife. Office Depot has the Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 on sale for $199.91. It’s for online ordering of in-store pickups, and out of stock at all stores near me, but probably good enough for a Best Buy price match. Except Samsung multi-window mode is infuriating.
On basically every Android device, you press the multitasking button, it pops up a card view of your recent apps, and you page through them to pick which ones you want to close, or switch between.
Swipe an app to the left of the right and it closes. Or just hit the X in the top right. Tap on an app to switch into it. This works. It is good.
But Samsung, oh dear Samsung, has broken this basic function of Android, in the name of providing a multi-window mode that is a sorta-kinda-maybe nice thing to have, but not if it TOTALLY BREAKS THE ANDROID APP SWITCHING METHOD.
I was recently in Best Buy playing with a couple different Samsung tablets, and I tried switching between apps. I’d hit the recent apps button, and tap on an app, but it wouldn’t switch into the app. THE ONLY THING I COULD DO from the recent apps screen was to multi-window a particular app. I couldn’t get it to just switch into the damn app. No double tap, no long-press, nothing.
I tried messing with the settings to see if there was some way to disable this multi-window mode and get back regular app switching, but there was nothing.
I looked at the manuals for multiple different Samsung tablets and the instructions were unclear. Maybe I’m missing something? I might have to go back to the store and mess with it further.
This is stupid. Multi-windowing of apps on a tablet is all well and good, but it’s much less frequently used than just switching from one app back into another one. It makes no sense to make the multi-window mode not only the default setting, but the only behavior, and totally removing the much more frequently used switching between apps.
Stupid Samsung, now I’m not going to buy your stupid tablet, even for $100 off the usual price.