While Samsung is busy touting its new 5.7-inch Note 3, LG appears to be prepping a stylus-equipped phablet with more budget-oriented hardware than its Galaxy competitor. The alleged LG G Pro Lite Dual features low-end specs, and could bring the pen back to large-screened LG smartphones.
LG’s 5-inch Intuition (49.99 on a two-year contract) handset also comes with an included stylus, but more recent flagships such as the 5.2-inch G2 or 5.5-inch Optimus G Pro do not. According to a Russian technology website, the newer LG handset would come with a 5.5-inch IPS display with a low resolution of 540 x 960-pixels, which is significantly lower than that of the LG G2 (1920 x 1080) and Galaxy Note 3 (1080p).
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Rather than sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 like the LG G2 or a quad-core Snapdragon like the Optimus G Pro, the phablet is said to come with a dual-core 1-GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. Users can expect 8GB of storage space according to the leak, but this will be expandable to via a microSD card slot.
Similar to LG’s latest flagship G2, the budget-minded phablet will come packed with the company’s signature features such as Knock On and Guest Mode. The Korea-based electronics maker will pack the Pro Lite Dual with an 8-megapixel main camera, which sports a smaller sensor than the 13-megapixel shooter found in the G2 and Optimus G Pro. Like the G Pro, however, the G Pro Lite Dual will feature a 3,140 mAh battery.
The phone is expected to hit Russia in mid-October for the U.S. equivalent of $400, although we have yet to hear about a North American release date. The G Pro Lite Dual would be one of the few phablets to target budget-minded smartphone shoppers, if it lands in the U.S. The first generation Samsung Galaxy Note still comes with slightly better hardware, however. The original Note, which you can still snag on Amazon for a little cheaper, comes with a sharper 1280 x 800, 5.2-inch display, a slightly faster 1.5-GHz processor and 16GB of onboard storage.
