Gadgetory

LG G pad 8.3 strongly resembles the new Nexus 7 but it also is playing in the same category as another 8 inch tablet device the Galaxy Note 8.0 we're gonna take a quick look at how these compare here at Aoife in 2013 in Berlin I'm Michael Fisher with pocket now let's get to it so side by side the differences in the aesthetic design become apparent LG is opted for an aluminum back panel here and contrast with Samsung's traditional build quality of hyper glaze 2 polycarbonate you can also notice right up front here that the speakers these are stereo speakers left and right on the back unfortunately our back mounted not side mounted like on Samsung's device which one you prefer will depend on how you use the tablet more we were able to cover up these speakers with our thumbs in both our full review and the after the buzz a little more often than we would have liked so maybe you will prefer this arrangement both have 5 megapixel primary camera surround the back as well and as far as thickness goes we're not looking at a major Gulf they're aged LG's new tablet as 8.3 millimeters the real difference of course being and actually mentioned by the way IR blaster their IR blaster up top or transmitter if you prefer a real difference being measurement wise in bezel size these are I believe seven point nine millimeters on the new LG tablet samsung's bezel size is significantly larger thanks to the requirement to include the s-pen which of course we've looked at quite a bit everyone knows how that works and what kind of value of that adds LG did not include a stylus on this device you can use a capacitive stylus with it of course but there are some aspects of the software that emulate or reproduce some of the note aids features and take a look at those in a second but just so we get a feel for the displays here this is a 1920 by 1200 display over here 8.3 inches full HD IPS the Galaxy Note I believe is 1280 by 800 obviously a big pixel density improvement on the LG product let's take a look in software and see what we can learn in terms of software here it's a little difficult to show the differences in the lock screen because LG's unit here is locked into some kind of a retail demo mode but the the new to G pad 8.3 does have na komm which allows you to double tap on the screen both to lock in to unlock the tablet which we find pretty nice Samsung replicating that functionality with a physical home button down below which LG does not incorporate you can see the software keys down here back home and menu a couple other hidden features in there as well but the lock buttons off to the side on each one we can lock and unlock traditionally if you prefer as we were saying before the S Pen adds a whole lot of functionality to the note 8 that we've talked rather extensively about that LG has not been skimping on the added features here as you can see in the notification tray here we've got very similar controls the first brightness goes and some of those toggles there's an entire tray of qslide apps which you can run seulji's multitasking approach you can run these apps side by side you can run them in Windows you have various options for changing their transparency and so on one of the areas that excites us the most of the difference in multitasking approach the Samsung you can pull up the the application ribbon there of course as you can at any Android device and you can also I'm not going to do that one you can also throw applications to applications side by side with each other you're gonna switch them invert them and so on that's really a lot of fun LG in addition to providing the the standard multitasking ribbon just like on the Samsung device or any Android device it has a slider side so we can open Chrome there we go there's Chrome we wait if you rather than just closing it we use three fingers to swipe it off to the side a little bit of a cumbersome gesture but once you get the hang of it and assuming your three fingers handy you throw all these over there and then when you want to pull the ribbon back and just three fingers swipe over there you have your apps you can tap right into them to jump into them or if you prefer hop back in here you can toss them out the top of the screen as Anton just noted in his hands-on with this device it's a lot like webOS of course LG now owns the rights to much of webOS so that shouldn't be a surprise it is interesting a lot of other features here and of course we've got LG is Q memo which though there's no S Pen here does allow it to use your fingertip does provide quite a few options for what kind of you know marker you want to use I want to say servo this and so yeah we want to do a hangout and we definitely want to do it on Google we also sort of want to do a voice search later on I don't know who would do that but if you wanted to do that you could do it a lot of other functionality here of course as well this is just a very very quick look the software differences here between TouchWiz on Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 and LG's custom UI I will say this LG no stranger to making responsive user interface this is kind of a similar but you can notice this little springy action we get at the end of the home screen here yeah icons just come up and they bounce back yeah it's a little cartoony it's a little but it is responsive it's the kind of responsiveness we first saw on the what was it the Optimus G really blew us away and that appears from the case here just not even though this device has been abused it's also running a special retail mode really really white I mean really tough to get this to bog down it's pretty impressive Galaxy Note 8 no slouch of course but Samsung you know not quite as up to the task in terms of raw responsiveness of the UI but like we say very quick look we're gonna have a proper comparison of these two devices in the weeks ahead once we get a review unit our hands till now we've got till then rather a lot more to do at Eva here in Berlin I'm Michael Mitchell at PocketNow that's Tony behind the camera stay tuned for a lot more