[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] glabifrons:
That's what they show on their website, but it has not worked for me at all. I've tried repeatedly with vol+ & power, vol- & power, vol+ & vol- & power... nothing has worked, it always boots fully up.

Is yours the A729 with bluetooth from TigerDirect? (their website lists that only the TigerDirect version has Bluetooth)

Were you actually able to get into the stock recovery menu?

---------- Post added at 09:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:42 PM ----------

I called them and I definitely did not find them customer-friendly.

I politely pointed out that the Users menu was missing and as I understand it, it's only an entry in a config file to enable it and asked if it would be possible to get a patch as I bought this for my son and didn't want to have to root it and the guy on the phone cut me off mid-sentence and scolded me for even mentioning rooting the device and told me it'd void my warranty. I asked about the firmware image and he was very dismissive about it. I asked if I could submit a bug report about the fact that a valuable feature of JB 4.2+ was missing (and the fact that this was a tablet that appeared to have a phone build of Android, more below). I'm not even sure how to describe his response "you want to submit a BUG REPORT?!"... yes, I do. He gruffly agreed to take down my request and proceeded to ask me for full contact info (full name, address, email, phone number, etc.). When I asked for the case number, he was confused... they apparently have no bug or complaint tracking system whatsoever. He explained to me that there was no way the developers were going to provide a patch, that Android is open source and it's up to the developers to decide how to configure the builds, etc. After some back and forth, I finally asked him how big the company was. He was obviously taken aback, so I explained that he seemed to know an awful lot about what the developers would be willing to do... he took this as a compliment and explained that I had "called corporate" (I called the support number on their website).

This screams "tiny operation" to me... either this guy was one of the developers (answering the customer support line), one of the main people in the company, or they're simply an importer and order the devices in bulk and resell them with nothing more than a custom logo.

Alibaba lists this unit for "US $1 - 45"... minimum qty 100 units.

More on the build: This device appears to have a default config for a phone, as not only is the Users menu missing, but it has a "Mobile network settings" menu which is entirely non-applicable to a device like this (menu items include "Data roaming", "Preferred network type" (2G/3G), "Network operators", etc.).

I sure hope I caught him on a bad day, and others have better luck.

Oh - and the reason I was reluctant to root it right away was I'm a bit gunshy and wanted to make sure I could return it if I needed to. I recently had a horrid experience with a d2 tablet that bricked itself (black-screen before splash-screen) after a few hours of use on Christmas morning (nearly every review on newegg for the device, all posted after I bought it, had the exact same problem). I'm lucky I was able to send that one back for a refund. Thankfully, this one appears to be a *lot* more reliable a unit (my son has played many, many hours of games on it for the past month).