LG G Pad 8.3 hands-on

LG G Pad 8.3

LG re-enters the Android tablet market with a device designed to balance size, specs and weight

Welcome back, LG. It's been a couple years since we saw a tablet from the South Korean company a hot mess of 3D at that and it's back in fine form with the G Pad 8.3.

We got our first look at this guy here at the IFA conference in Berlin, and from the get-go it's fairly impressive. Thin, light and big but not too big, LG's got what should be a nice little option.

The G Pad 8.3 borrows heavily from the smartphone side of things. Same UI, and mostly the same features, but with a couple new twists. The main one is Q Pair, which will connect the tablet not just to LG's most recent flagship, the G2 but to any Android phone that can download the Q Pair app from Google Play, once it's available.

Once they're connected, you'll be able to get simultaneous notifications on the phone and tablet and they're actionable. So if a phone call comes in, you can take in through the tablet. Or decline it. Or decline it with a text message. Even in its early, unfinished iteration, it works pretty well. We'll have to see how great it is with non-LG phones, though.

LG's gone to great lengths to make all this synergy pretty seamless. Want to tether from your phone? It's one-touch access far more simple than what we have on any other device at this point.

Otherwise, you're pretty much looking at the same software we've come to know in the LG G2 for better or for worse. The on-board Snapdragon 600 processor used in lieu of the beefier Snapdragon 800 for thermal purposes, among others keeps the UI running as smooth as we'd expect, which is to say, pretty good.

As far as the G Pad serving as a tablet, it definitely looks and feels bigger than our current go-to device, the Nexus 7. That's not a bad thing it's supposed to be bigger, and LG went through the Korean national registry to research what would be the optimal size for one-handed use for folks between the ages of 20 and 60 and 8.3 inches is what they came up with. (If you want to get technical, it's about 1 mm shy of that limit of 127 mm, actually.)

We'll give this guy a further what-for once the software's more settled and we don't yet have any first dates or pricing, but we should see it in the states, for sure but for now, enjoy our brief look here in Berlin.