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New LG tablet ZNFLK430


Rawvega

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Yeah, we have been discussing this tablet for a few days now in our behind the scenes FCC OET staff thread.  Be aware that it is 3GPP only.  So, it does support bands 25/26/41, but it does not support any CDMA2000 whatsoever -- if that matters to you.

 

Since cellular tablets eschew voice capability, I expect to see more and more be 3GPP only.  In and of itself, that is not necessarily bad -- even for Sprint.  However, if you want quality Qualcomm baseband chipsets in these tablets, you may get cut rate 3GPP only baseband chipsets instead.  For example, see the Nexus 9.

 

Just FYI... 

 

AJ

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Yeah, we have been discussing this tablet for a few days now in our behind the scenes FCC OET staff thread.  Be aware that it is 3GPP only.  So, it does support bands 25/26/41, but it does not support any CDMA2000 whatsoever -- if that matters to you.

 

Since cellular tablets eschew voice capability, I expect to see more and more be 3GPP only.  In and of itself, that is not necessarily bad -- even for Sprint.  However, if you want quality Qualcomm baseband chipsets in these tablets, you may get cut rate 3GPP only baseband chipsets instead.  For example, see the Nexus 9.

 

Just FYI... 

 

AJ

There are plenty of high-quality non-Qualcomm Gobi baseband chipsets out there in the 3GPP space.

 

For example, Intel (formerly Infineon), NVIDIA Icera, and Samsung Exynos Modem are all basebands that are excellent. Some of them were even ahead of Qualcomm in the past (Intel and Icera both supported carrier aggregation before Qualcomm did, and DC-HSPA+ was implemented by ST-Ericsson before Qualcomm).

 

The amount of competition in the 3GPP baseband space basically prevents subpar chips from becoming successful, which is why VIA Telecom has no share in the 3GPP market (they sell GSM-only radios for the Chinese market, but no ODM uses them).

 

So I would say modems used by these devices (Icera in the Nexus 9, for instance) are not necessarily "cut-rate". They work very well, indeed.

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  • 1 month later...

Ooooo I was so hoping Sprint would get the G-Pad!

 

But kinda bummed it's only 8GB and not 16GB like the Tab 4.... but it does have Lollipop... Hmmmmm.

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I'm considering it too...but I've never done a tablet on my cell plan before...are they waiving the tablet access fee, and you're required to hold like a 1gb data plan for the term? I'm considering this since I'm pretty safe to say I'll be in an LG phone for the next 2 years at minimum.

 

(Really depends on the LG G4 I guess before I can say for sure, I'm seeing some rumors that the S810 chip just sucks and Qualcomm is trying to run damage control to cover up how bad the 810 will suck (lag, overheating and playing nicely with GPUs)

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I'm considering it too...but I've never done a tablet on my cell plan before...are they waiving the tablet access fee, and you're required to hold like a 1gb data plan for the term? I'm considering this since I'm pretty safe to say I'll be in an LG phone for the next 2 years at minimum.

 

(Really depends on the LG G4 I guess before I can say for sure, I'm seeing some rumors that the S810 chip just sucks and Qualcomm is trying to run damage control to cover up how bad the 810 will suck (lag, overheating and playing nicely with GPUs)

You can add a tablet with its own data bucket, or add it to a data share plan. I'm not sure, but I think they are waiving the tablet access fee on data share through 2015. After that its $10.
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  • 1 month later...

Has anyone purchased the G Pad yet? 

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I'm on the phone with them now, and ordering it. She didn't have to try very hard to make this sale either, I was already considering it...My toddler broke my 10.1" Galaxy Tab 3 a couple of days ago, so I was interested in getting another one anyway.

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I'm on the phone with them now, and ordering it. She didn't have to try very hard to make this sale either, I was already considering it...My toddler broke my 10.1" Galaxy Tab 3 a couple of days ago, so I was interested in getting another one anyway.

 

When you get it, could you do a review of it? 

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Well, I've only had it a couple of hours, but it's pretty impressive on radio strength. My G3 lost LTE on the way home, but the tablet held on for about 2 miles further, then it dropped.

 

This has prompted me (the tablet purchase) to change over to a shared "bucket" plan with my phones. I went from an 8-person "Framily" (sorry strangers that I don't know who had those other 3 lines) to a 20gb shared data bucket, which also includes the tablet...

I was going to just do a 1GB data plan on the tablet for $15/mo, but I figured why do that when the 20gb would be sufficient for us, our highest month of use the past year only hit 6gb...

 

One thing I saw is that the billing system shows you with "roaming data" on the LG G Tab....but you technically can NOT roam.

If you look in the Mobile Networks setting...LTE is the ONLY option you have.

Many may not know, but there is NO CDMA on this tablet...it's LTE or nothing (well, wifi of course, but mobile-speaking)...

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Another odd but welcomed thing, lte is a lot stronger than with my g3. I took a couple speed tests earlier with the tablet, as seen here

 

Check out my Ookla Speedtest result. What's your speed? http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/1242177025

 

My phone is barely getting decent speed tests and I'm not sure why. In same spot the G3 only gets about 12mbps down and 4mbps up

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Anyone know why the radio is so much better than a phone like the G3? I mean, compared to the G3, the tablet is awesome in the radio dept.

 

Bigger antennas.

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Must be amazingly bigger...I just went out in my yard...where I've never picked up LTE service before on ANY band, on ANY device...and just a few feet from my house in the front yard, I grabbed a LTE 800 signal that was strong enough to run a speedtest...

 

5.10mbps down, 1.68mbps up, 65ms ping.

 

In the same spot, my G3 grabs a VZW roaming signal..

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I guess I'll try to make this my formal "review"....as I've never done one before...but I do have a few things that really make me say "I'm glad I decided to get this after all"...so here goes:

 

System and Signal:

First off, the OS being 5.0.1 and not having to do any type of update was nice. Since I ordered my tab via telesales, all I had to do was turn it on and wait. I started out with the original plan being 100mb tablet / monthly, keeping my 5 cell phones on the 8-person framily plan with the other 3 strangers that joined me last year.  I picked up the tablet from UPS's hub, which is 2 minutes from Walmart...so I decided to activate it while I was grabbing a couple things from Walmart. I turned it on while I was walking around shopping...signed in, and immediately noticed the screen was very pretty with it's color depth. Blacks are rich and vibrant, and the range/gamut is great compared to my G3.

Set-up was fairly quick, and activation only took a few seconds. I decided to sign in to my Fbook and grab a recipe that my wife wanted me to get ingredients for, and she had tagged me on the recipe via fbook...so I downloaded that app, signed in, and set-up the fbook thing.

Did a few more things while I was shopping and then I headed home. Normally, I get about 4-5 miles from Walmart and my G3 loses LTE and drops back to 3G. I kept glancing at the tablet during my drive home, and noticed that it held on to the LTE 800 signal another 3 miles longer than my G3 does...so that was impressive.

 

Battery life:

Overall, I'm impressed with the battery life as well. I don't use airplane mode while I'm at home, and even though I live in a fringe LTE area, and you would think it would burn the battery searching for LTE while at home, it really doesn't. I pulled it from charging yesterday morning at 100% around 7:30am. At 9am, it was still sitting on 100% with light SoT and use on LTE.

At bedtime last night, it was at 67%. The stats showed 12hrs of use and still plenty of life left.

 

Lasting impressions:

 

Since I had to do something about my tablet data plan, I was forced to swap into a data "bucket" plan and went with the 20gb shared plan, which also gives my tablet shared data..

I find myself using it more than I ever thought I would, even though I've owned an Android tablet for a few years now -- I just havent owned an Android tablet that was anything except Wifi.

This tablet made a good impression on me with the signal quality and antenna's gain...at -125db signal I still can get a very usable LTE signal, with speedtests ranging from 4 to 5mbps down and 2-3mbps up on that signal.

 

First, I'll list the only cons I can come up with (there aren't but a couple):

 

Cons:

1. Wifi is only N or below. No 5ghz wifi, but it'll work just fine. I really don't "need" a device to be 5ghz capable, the only reason I ever use it is when I'm in a beta test for network equipment that requires me to use the 5ghz and 2.4ghz to see how they work.

 

2. Speaker placement is on the bottom RH side (looking at the back of the tablet). The sound is good coming from it, but it's very "directional"...doesn't have that full sound you get with some of the phones.

 

Really can't come up with much more, maybe not having auto brightness could be listed, but that's not really a problem for me either.

 

Pros:

 

1. I listed mostly everything I find as a pro in the first part of this...but, first and foremost: SIGNAL acquisition is amazing!!

2. Battery life is also very good, even with heavy SoT.

3. Having such good LTE reception, coupled with the 20gb bucket and hotspot included..you can imagine the possibilites.

4. Appearance - while I'm used to having a 10.1" tab the past 2 years, reverting to a 7" was not "comfortable" until it arrived. That quickly dissipated the more I used it, and now I am very pleased. Aesthetics are visually appealing, colors/brightness/contrast are great, and even in bright sunlight, you can easily see the screen.

 

(for those tempted to buy one, please be sure you read this twice: NO CDMA. You will not get 3G with this..even though ...for some reason...Sprint gives you "roaming" up to ***kbs..)

 

LTE 25 and LTE 26 work great. I can't say for LTE 41 as I don't have anywhere in my state to test that...but I'm sure it's fine as well...

It might be that the battery does so well because it's LTE on those 3 bands only, without having to scan other frequencies. That's my thoughts.

 

I'll be happy to answer any questions anyone might have. I can post pics to if someone wishes to see the tablet or any screens from it.

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thanks for the review.

 

I had been thinking hard about getting one of these to replace my nexus 7/2013/wifi/32gig, however with only 8 gig storage that is like so 5 years ago.

 

Even my mother using my original 8 gig nexus 7 2012 constantly runs out of space with her various slot machine apps.

 

8 gig (i'm assuming its more like 5 gig usable), would be like 2 games, some music and books and done.

 

I'm no longer really interested in external sd card storage, I have had too many memory cards fail after time and cause all kinds of problems.

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I know it sounds weird, but I like having the LTE only LG tablet. I have used both the LG pad, and the Tab 4 for the past 2 days, and I don't like knowing that the Tab 4 can hit it's roaming limit in little or no time at all...

I wish they put the option for LTE only...or at the least, Sprint only...but I haven't found a way to do that yet.

 

Also, with the shared plan including the Hotspot...that is just awesome. Years ago, I would custom ROM my device so I could occasionally use hotspot...but never streamed movies or used it as my primary ISP option. The times I did use hotspot, I was sitting in my vehicle -- parked -- with my laptop and looking up something online. These were brief, once or twice a year occurrences that never used over 1 gb anyway...and finally the past couple years I just quit doing it at all...I kinda feel like it should've been part of the unlimited plans all along, but I wasn't paying for it, so I quit rooting just to have it. And now it's included, i doubt I'll need it, but it's nice to have.

Nothing means more than value for money, and that really adds value to a tablet / phone to be able to share it's data connection.

I don't foresee anything that I will need to have hotspot for, but I'll be looking for reasons to use it for sure.

 

As for the Tab 4...I'm not sure I'd want to enable the hotspot on it...if I was in a fringe LTE area, and dropped to 3G roaming...with hotspot enabled...that may not work out too well. I hope that hotspot shuts itself off if it's not in native coverage..never used it enough to know how that works.

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I picked up this tablet for my wife this afternoon. It was completely free. The tablet will bill at $10 a month for 2 years and I will be credited at $10 a month for 2 years. The tablet did not require its own data plan either rather the data usage comes out of our family data bucket. I understand that this is plan dependent.

 

For free you can't beat this tablet though it is very bare bones hardware. It is only 8 gigabytes to begin with and 4.5 gigabytes is used up from the start and that is after removing everything that came on it that is removable.

 

I put 6 or 7 apps that my wife enjoys and the device is down to about 1.7 gigabytes. The UI of the tablet itself seems to do fine with lollipop despite having only 1 gigabyte of RAM. You do notice the 1 gigabyte when scrolling in apps that have a lot of photos like Facebook. There is definitely stutter.

 

During the setup of the device it instantaneously rebooted twice so that is a little concerning but has not repeated since.

 

For being completely free, if it ends up being a great device for email and casual web browsing then it was well worth it.

 

Her S6 does not have a usable data connection in her office so this will hopefully supplement her.

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I'll add this to my previous "review"...

 

I'm not seeing this tablet as very pleasing either, due to it's poor hardware. It's 2015..they should've put a little more under the hood..SoC, Ram, storage,...but, I guess since it has LTE-only mode, it'll make a good hotspot.

I've turned the LG over to my wife, and taken ownership of the Galaxy Tab 4.

I like it much better than the Gpad, but ...if anyone can tell me how to get LTE-only with it...please let me know!!

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