LG Electronics LGV700 10.1″ Android 5.0 Tablet — Infuriating Rather Than Compelling.

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by Anura Guruge

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>> Le Pan 10.2″ 16GB Android Pad.


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I got this LG LGV700 10.1″ Android Pad as a backup for my 8 month old 10.2″ Le Pan tablet. The Le Pan when it works, which is 95% of the time, is formidable. It is fast, flawless and has no eccentricities or foibles. But, alas, a fatal flaw lurks somewhere within it. Every once in a while it just dies. We are talking dead as a doornail. Responds to nothing. The on/off button becomes powerless. It is dead. So far, inexplicably, it has come to life after such a sudden death. It is like a resurrection. Sometimes if I bang on it you will suddenly hear this ‘whirring’ noise, like a hard-drive kicking in, and it will go through a complete reboot process. Once it has resurrected itself it is its usual flawless self until it next decides to die. I have an extended warranty on it — so I don’t really care. One of these days I will return it and get $200 (or something like that) back from Walmart.

But it would be annoying to be without a pad, not that there is a shortage of pads in this house. But, my pad, has my Apps and is customized for my habbits. So Deanna, the other morning, when she saw me banging the Le Pan to activate it, told me to get a backup. That was the LG LGV700.

The LGV700 looks nice. Very slim. Nice contours. Appealing tactile feel. I plugged it into recharge, using the Le Pan charger (since they are all the same in the end), and set it aside. I wasn’t excited or anything. It was just another pad, a backup at that. A few hours later I went to get it setup. There was a TUTORIAL that had been activated and it was TALKING AWAY at me, very loud and annoyingly. It was, as we later found out, an ‘accessibility’ tool, called TALK-BACK. And it sure did talk-back. That is all it bloody did. Talk-Back. It was an ‘User Interface’ explaining tutorial. Every Time you bloody touched the screen it told you what you were doing! Jesus would have wept. I did more. Just could NOT get out of it. Deanna and the two kids joined in. They are all Android users. They tried. TOUCH WAS DISABLED. You had to bloody double knock. It was a nightmare. I hated it. I am not destructive and very rarely lose my temper. I was ready to smash this pad. I didn’t care that I had paid $2xx — whatever for it. I hated it. But we persevered. The kids sitting with me to stop me from totally losing it. We got Wi-Fi going with the bloody talk jabbering away. Can’t Koreans pronounce Wi-Fi? It is NOT ‘We-Fe’. Hated it. Finally we finished the setup. Then we could get to to SETTINGS. Then we found how to disable the frigging Talk-Back. Then there was this stupid Knock Code.

It works. It is kind of fast. The system update gave me Android 5.0.2. There wasn’t that much clutter. The Wi-Fi chipset seems decent. Accepted the microSD card without any fuss.

But all said, it is not as fast as my Le Pan when I am using Chrome — and using Chrome is what I do 95% of the time! It is slow and it doesn’t render as fast.

So it is OK. That whole set-up fiasco with Talk-Back soured the whole experience. I am no empathy with this pad.

The miniscule 4.2″ x 2.5″ English/Spanish Quick Start Guide came with the pad was beyond a joke. Had nothing about the bloody Talk-Back based set-up. 40 pages of English — 34 of them “For your Safety”. It was a joke.

I will NOT recommend this LG LGV700. It works and that is about all. IF you can get the Le Pan. It is at least 10 times better. The Le Pan is unobtrusive — when it is not dead. [It is, alas, however, very obtrusive when it is dead.] So that is that. This time next year I will most likely have two new pads!