Will hit the store this January and is, to some extent, waterproof

Jan 4, 2012 15:47 GMT  ·  By

It appears that networking technologies have advanced a great deal, to the point where tablets with support for 4G LTE are about to take the world by storm.

AT&T is sure to want to be at the forefront of the 4G LTE movement.

LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is the moniker applied to one of the wireless networking technologies superior to 3G.

LTE is, thus, one variation of 4G and is bound to show up as a feature on many mobile gadgets this year (2012).

It so happens that a leak surfaced and blew the whistle on the Pantech Element tablet.

It will become available on January 8, just before CES 2012, either with a two-year contract or without one.

When bought along with a data plan, AT&T will ask customers to pay $299.99 for it, or 232 Euro (give or take).

Off contract, the Element bears the fairly common price of $449.99 (348 Euro).

That said, the tablet measures 8 inches in screen diagonal and relies on a dual-core processor with a clock speed of 1.5 GHz.

16 GB of flash storage are offered by default, along with a 5-megapixel rear camera and another camera of 2 megapixels, on the front.

Full HD videos should be played just fine and even video calls ought to be more than easy to hold with other people from around the world.

What may stand out in particular is the water protection that the Pantech Element reportedly possesses. It is compliant with the IP57 waterproof rating, which means it will survive splashes without trouble, provided the ports are all closed. In other words, it can't actually take being submerged in water, but rainy days should be simple to cope with.

The version of the Android operating system loaded onto this tablet is 3.2 (Honeycomb).