For seemingly ever now Verizon’s tablet lineup has been incredibly terrible. If you wanted to use Verizon’s usually excellent LTE service on your tablet you usually had to pick one of their garbage tablets like the Galaxy Tab series or something else incredibly underwhelming and overpriced. That is of course until recently when they added the rather amazing 2013 Nexus 7 LTE but still sold it for a pretty insane $249 price on a 2-year contract. Today though Verizon is blowing us away by adding not one amazing tablet, but two, and one of them has an absolutely amazing price too.
First we’ll start with the so-so addition of the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro (pictured above) to Verizon’s LTE tablet lineup. There’s nothing wrong with the Galaxy Note Pro in any way, in fact quite the opposite. It features a dazzling 12.2-inch screen with an incredible 2560 x 1600 resolution, making that a 247 pixels-per-inch. While that’s not the most dense tablet screen we’ve ever seen, especially from Samsung, it’s still considerably better than most tablets Samsung makes, and at 12.2 inches you’re not going to mind as much given the absolutely massive amount of screen real-estate that’s going on. The Note Pro is powered by the same Snapdragon 800 processor with 3GB RAM that the Galaxy Note 3 has, which means you’ll probably never see any real slowdown no matter how much stuff you’re running. The tablet also has a rather decent 8 megapixel rear-facing camera, but you’re going to look pretty stupid holding a tablet this big up for pictures during every day events, just saying. This is also running Samsung’s latest tablet UI featuring 4-way multi-tasking, allowing you to run 4 apps at once, one in each corner of the screen. It’s also using Android 4.4.2 KitKat and the Pro version of TouchWiz, and also features the physical home button with capacitive back and recents buttons if you prefer that sort of thing. The bad part here? It’s an incredibly ridiculous $749.99 with a two-year contract. Not really sure how well that’s going to work out for Verizon considering the full price of the tablet is just $100 more at $849.99 and you’re not tied into a ridiculous contract. Oh and there’s 32GB of storage built into the Note Pro as well as a microSD slot for extra storage if you need it.
Next up is the really good deal, and an incredible tablet overall at that. The LG G Pad, which is essentially a souped up version of the Nexus 7 with a bigger screen and LG’s software, is available for an amazing $99 on a 2-year contract. That’s $200 off the full price, which is actually $299 through Verizon, and if you compare that with the WiFi-only model sold through LG or Google Play which goes for $349 you’ll probably be scratching your heads. Clearly Verizon and LG have made some sort of deal here, and it’s likely going to give consumers a great option all while saving money. The G Pad is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600, which is the same processor inside the HTC One or Galaxy S4 for reference. It’s got 2GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear camera, 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot to add more if need be. The 8.3-inch 1920 x 1200 resolution display features a 273 pixel-per-inch screen density, so a little higher than the Note Pro’s but a little lower than the 2013 Nexus 7’s. Right now the G Pad is running Android 4.2.2 with LG’s skin, and basically resembles a giant LG G2, which is actually pretty awesome if you ask me. Given that LG just pushed out Android 4.4 KitKat to the G2 we expect the G Pad to get the same treatment soon, although it’s a shame that it didn’t just launch with Google’s latest mobile OS. Regardless this is a great buy, especially if you were looking for an LTE tablet on Verizon’s network.