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Consumer electronics manufacturer LG announced the U.S. launch of G Pad 8.3 tablet, the latest device in the company’s premium “G” line of mobile products.
The tablet, which has a 8.3-inch full-HD In-Plane Switching (IPS) touch-screen display, is available now for purchase online at Best Buy’s Website, and will be available at in-store at retailers nationwide starting with Best Buy on Nov. 3 for a suggested price of $349.99.
The device is powered by a 1.7GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor, includes 2GB of RAM and is equipped with a microSD slot, which is good for up to 64GB of additional storage. Running Google Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2, the tablet also boasts a 5-megapixel camera and a 4,600mAh Li-polymer battery.
“From its light weight to its sleek design, LG G Pad 8.3 is the ultimate complement to the Android smartphone experience,” James Fishler, senior vice president of marketing for LG Electronics USA, said in a statement. “LG G Pad 8.3 delivers top-notch viewing and entertainment for Android users with its impressive full-HD screen and useful, intuitive multitasking tools like those found in LG G2.”
A key feature of the tablet is connectivity across all Android mobile devices, including the company’s G2 smartphone, with QPair, which gives users an extension to their Android smartphones by providing simultaneous access to recently opened apps, incoming calls, text messages and more.
The G Pad 8.3 also uses LG’s suite of multitasking capabilities, such as QSlide Function 2.0, which allows the user to float two apps over the main screen with adjustable window size and transparency. The device also comes equipped with Slide Aside, letting users simply move between any three open applications with a swipe of three fingers, for faster multitasking.
The tablet debuts as a crowded market appears to be cooling off. Worldwide tablet shipments in the second quarter experienced a sequential decline as total volumes fell nearly 10 percent from the first quarter, according to an August report from IT research firm IDC.
However, unit shipments of 45.1 million in the second quarter were up 59.6 percent from the same quarter in 2012, when tablet vendors shipped 28.3 million devices.
The multitude of devices running Android allowed the operating system to rank as the top OS in the tablet market, representing 62.6 percent of all devices shipped (28.2 million units), while Apple’s iOS platform accounted for 32.5 percent of market share with 14.6 million iPad devices sold.