LG G Pad 7.0 review: Back at it

Gallery

The Gallery stacks photos and videos together in albums, which can be organized by the date they were taken or the source they come from. Location-based sorting is also available, or you can have the Gallery display just your videos - especially useful as the G Pad 7.0 doesn't come with a dedicated Video player app.

As usual, there is an array of available options at your disposal. You can share, highlight, and delete images, as well as set them as backgrounds, assign them to contacts, add them to a specific album, or print them.

Editing images takes you to Google's Photos app, used in lieu of a picture editor from LG.

Gallery

The gallery supports viewing your images in their full resolution. You can easily pinch-zoom to 1:1 magnification and beyond.

Video player

The video player on the LG G Pad 7.0 is basically a view-only-videos setting of the Gallery app. Controls-wise you get Play/Pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons, in addition to a slider to scrub through the video. Scrubbing through the video doesn't give you the animated preview that we saw on the LG G3 and there are now captions either.

Video player

Videos support subtitles and you hand pick the one you want. QSlide is also supported for the video player - you can pop out a video to watch as an overlay to any other screen on the G Pad 7.0, adjust the size of the pop up window and also its opacity.

Video player • QSlide

The LG G Pad 7.0 played most of the files we threw at it. It didn't manage to output audio when we played AC-3 and DTS audio codecs in video and played to load MKV, MOV, WMV and FLV videos, AAC audio coding was fine along with MP3 and FLAC. AVI, MP4, MPG, DivX and Xvid videos weren't an issue for the tablet. 1080p was the maximum resolution at which it managed to play files.

Some files were jittery with a couple of lost frames but mostly things played smooth.

Music player

LG's music player on the G Pad 7.0 looks and operates the same as its counterpart on the LG G3. Your music library is organized by various categories, with the Album view being the most interesting thanks to its large album thumbnails.

The Now playing screen will display the Album art and playback controls, which you can swipe to the sides for the next/previous track.

Music player

There's a robust equalizer on board, complete with a wide variety of presets. You can also adjust the playback pitch and speed.

Equalizer settings

When playing a song, playback controls will appear in the notification center and lockscreen, although on the latter the album art is rather unpleasantly stretched.

Audio quality is nicely clean, but quiet

The LG G Pad 7.0 showed it's capable of producing nicely clean audio output in our test. The tablet posted some excellent scores in both parts of our test, suggesting that all tracks it handles will sound just the way they were meant to do. Its stereo crosstalk with headphones attached was particularly impressive and one of the best we've ever seen.

However, the volume levels of the slate left a lot to be desired. The LG G Pad 7.0 was below average when plugged into an active external amplifier and downright quiet when used with a pair of headphones. We are used to seeing smartphones do better than this and tablets are usually way louder, so we can't give full marks here.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
LG G Pad 7.0	+0.02, -0.08	-93.0	92.8	0.0016	0.0081	-92.8
LG G Pad 7.0 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.10	-93.1	92.9	0.0073	0.041	-89.0
LG G Pad 8.3	+0.14, -0.11	-93.8	92.9	0.0021	0.0082	-93.8
LG G Pad 8.3 (headphones attached)	+0.29, -0.11	-90.7	92.7	0.0074	0.208	-53.6
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0	+0.03, -0.04	-93.7	93.7	0.0053	0.010	-93.9
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.05	-93.4	93.6	0.0064	0.040	-61.6
Google Nexus 7 (2013)	+0.00, -0.23	-92.2	92.3	0.036	0.020	-92.3
Google Nexus 7 (2013)(headphones attached)	+0.83, -0.12	-92.4	92.3	0.010	0.208	-49.3
Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue	+0.02, -0.10	-87.7	87.6	0.0067	0.016	-86.4
Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue(headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.01	-90.0	89.8	0.020	0.040	-61.2

LG G Pad 7.0 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.