The LG G Pad 7 manual has been made available for download by the folks at LG Phones, and while it doesn’t reveal much regarding the G Pad (aside from the fact that it will have a microSD slot), it does contain a few interesting screenshots of LG’s UI redesign. These are all in line with the leaked designs we saw on the G3, so we expect to see this flatter UI on the company’s flagship during its unveiling tomorrow.
The first screenshot reveals LG’s new camera UI. Gone are the silver skeumorphic buttons, to be replaced with small white icons on a transparent background. LG seems to also be aware that you want as much visibility as possible when trying to frame your picture, so they included a Clean View shortcut that hides all menus on the view finder. The second screenshot reveals the new video player UI. It is rather similar to the current UI on the G2, except the playback buttons are slightly smaller and encased in a round icon. The lock button has gone down, and the video resizing button is completely gone, probably included under “More Options”. LG have kept their QSlide functionality that pops the video into an overlaid window and lets you watch while using other apps. There’s no sign of the object tracking or audio zoom buttons, we’re not sure if that means LG has decided to scrap these features or if they are simply not available on the G Pad 7.
The last screenshot reveals a very white-themed Now Playing screen from the music player. It is a lot cleaner and flatter than LG’s current music player UI, with the album cover taking the whole width of the screen, and the buttons being clustered above it, or below it in the control area. The whole design feels a bit like an unholy mix of Holo, Metro and iOS 7, but it still looks good in my opinion.
One last thing to note is that LG has finally ditched the Menu button from the on-screen keys, replacing it with the multitasking key and conforming with Google’s Android guidelines. They also got the order right, with the back button on the left and the multitasking button on the right.The fourth button is LG’s Dual Window key, a Samsung Multi-Window-like feature. What do you think of LG’s redesigned UI? Does it make their interface feel less cluttered than before? Or do you still prefer the Android AOSP look?
