LG says it's putting all new tablet development on the back burner in order to focus on smartphones for the time being.

LG is the latest to join a growing list of smartphone manufacturers who dipped their toes in the tablet waters only to yank them back out. Now that HTC's relationship with tablets has cooled-off, and the company released 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 Mobile World Conference earlier this year.

LG's focus on smartphones counts for Windows RT as much as Android, as the company specifically commented on Surface, noting that it won't have any products with which to compete.

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. More recently, we learned about the Optimus Pad LTE, which was announced at this year's CES, with plans to launch the tablet in South Korea. But we've heard little of it since. And from what LG 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.

This article originally published at Pocketnow here