LG G Pad 5 Might Be An Embarrassing Return To The Tablet Market

Although the Android tablet market has shrunken considerably, there are still quite a few OEMs making slates. Samsung is perhaps the most prolific among them, followed by Huawei and, to some extent, Amazon with its Fire tablets. LG was once part of that group but has become silent of late. According to leaks, it seems like the G Pad will be making a comeback but, based on that unofficial information, it might be arguable whether LG should have even made such a tablet at all.

On the surface, it sounds like the LG G Pad 5, a.k.a the LM-T600L, sounds like a decent mid-range tablet. It will have a 10.1-inch screen with a 1920x1200 screen. It has an LTE connection though no NFC chip and will reportedly have 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage.

Things get a bit weird when you get to the internals. According to specs found by XDA, this G Pad 5 tablet will be running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor. That's a platform launched back in mid-2016 and may actually be outperformed by more recent chips from the Snapdragon 600 and especially the 700 series.

Additionally, the tablet will be running Android 9 Pie out of the box. On the one hand, it might suggest that the launch of the tablet is probably close at hand. Given the absence of any major events, it could be one of LG's more silent product announcements. On the other hand, Android 10 is already out and LG is missing a chance to launch one of the first tablets based on the latest Android version.

Overall, LG will be missing a lot of opportunities by launch a tablet that is already outdated even before it hits stores. It is also rather puzzling that LG would suddenly launch a tablet out of the blue after two years of silence. What role a tablet will play in LG's shrinking mobile ecosystem is also yet to be revealed.