Monday, July 5, 2010

LG to launch Android-based tablet this year


Korean electronics company LG officially became part of the ever-growing Android clan earlier this year when they launched the TouchMax GW620 smartphone (available in the U.K.). Today, they've furthered their commitment with Google's mobile platform by announcing plans to release a digital media tablet built around it. According to Engadget, the company expects to have a product ready to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, unwilling to fall behind its fierce rival Samsung.

Unfortunately, there aren't yet any real details about the device just yet besides the fact that it will run Android. LG is also known to be working on a Windows 7 powered tablet. Dubbed UX10, the 10.1-inch device was shown off at Computex running on an Atom Z530 processor with 1GB of RAM. Other features included a 120GB hard drive, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, SD memory card slot, and HDMI output.

At that time Microsoft said the device would be maturing from prototype to general availability sometime soon, but now we're unsure if it suffered the same fate as the cancelled HP Slate. After all, Android is free, easy to integrate into a variety of hardware, and third-party app development for Google's mobile platform is thriving.