By Stephen Schenck

We just took a look at how HTC’s relationship with tablets has cooled-off, and after seeing the company release the Flyer and the Jetstream to a less-than-enthusiastic reception, it seems to have lost interest in the Vertex tablet it had demonstrated at the MWC. Now it appears that HTC won’t be alone among major smartphone manufacturers which have dipped their toes in the tablet waters only to yank them back out, upon LG revealing its own plans to leave tablets to the other guys.

An LG spokesperson has stated that the company is putting “all new tablet development on the back burner for the time being in order to focus on smartphones.” That counts for Windows RT as much as Android, as the company specifically commented on Surface, noting that it won’t have any products to compete with it.

Considering LG’s arm’s length approach to tablets so far, this news is hardly surprising. We had the Optimus Pad, with its 3D cameras but no 3D screen, and have more recently learned about the Optimus Pad LTE. The latter was announced at this year’s CES, with plans to launch the tablet in South Korea, but we’ve heard little of it since; from what LG’s said, it might already be dead in the water.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is if the Android tablet ecosystem will suffer from LG’s absence; while having more options is generally a good thing, the major tablet players like Samsung don’t seem to have any problem releasing a large variety of different tablet models on their own.

Source: Bloomberg
Via: IntoMobile