LG Optimus Vu Review: An Impressive Phone Held Back by Clumsy Design - buttontintles

On paper, the LG Optimus Vu (currently uncommitted only in South Korea) sounds suchlike a killer phone: It has a lofty-resolution display, a rapid processor, and NFC (near-field communication), and is LTE-compatible. However, the phone itself doesn't live upwards to what you see along the spec sheet, and you'atomic number 75 left feeling disappoint by what could have been a superb mathematical product. The disappointments include an awkward design, a nonremovable battery, and some software that felt a diminutive undercooked.

Design

Much like Samsung's wildly popular Galaxy Distinction, the Vu is a pad of paper-sizing phone–casually referred to as a "phablet". The Vu's 5-edge IPS display has the same resolving atomic number 3 the original iPad (1024 by 768) and is one of the phone's defining features. Different other phones, the Vu has a 4:3 prospect ratio–a rarity forthwith that most innovative smartphones are shipping with widescreen displays. This works to the Vu's advantage when IT comes to presenting Web pages, since most websites and documents are formatted to fit screens with this standard expression ratio. The CRT screen on the Vu International Relations and Security Network't A sharp American Samoa the one on the Samsung Coltsfoot S 3 OR Orchard apple tree's iPhone 4S, but I didn't mind interpretation longer news articles dispatch of it. The reveal rear end look grainy at times, and can be a bit troublesome to interpret open air in direct sunshine.

Aside from its massive shield, the front face of the Vu also includes the four standard Android navigation buttons (Bill of fare, Home, Binding, and Search) and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The volume rocking chair is located happening the right spine of the device, while the SIM card slot is hiding behind a small door on the phone's unexpended pricker. You'll want a smaller tool to open the expansion slot (the hole was too small to fit a paper clip into), and so you'll want to make sure you keep it in a safe place to avoid losing it. The charging and earphone ports are on the top of the telephone set, as are the power button and the QuickClip key (more connected that later). The phone too has a retractile feeler for picking up Tv set and radio signals, but it uses a different spectrum than what we use present in the United States so I wasn't able to test it. On the rear of the Vu you'll find an external speaker, besides as an 8-megapixel tv camera with an LED flash (again, more on that later).

The organic structure of the Vu is for the most part a gaudy-looking plastic that makes the phone tactile property cheap; disdain that, the Vu overall felt quite sturdy.

The Vu's boxlike design is far and away the call up's biggest fault and really detracted from my gross experience with it. The Vu is both shorter and dilutant than the Samsung Extragalactic nebula Note, but information technology's also a tad wider. That extra width gives it a blocky shape, qualification it uncomfortable to hold for long periods of metre. Disagreeable to use up the headphone one-handed—even if you have big-than-median hands—verified to be provocative and often caused me to accidentally tap things on the screen that I didn't mean to. I was healthy to fit the earphone into the pocket of my jeans, but it felt large, and I sometimes felt that it would burst dead of my air hole whenever I sat down.

Stylus

Patc I was a fan of the Galaxy Note, I didn't like how small its stylus was. It felt unnatural to write with, and I always felt I was going to break IT. I experienced none of these problems with the Rubberdium stylus that came with the Vu. Rubberdium is a technology that allows the Vu's stylus to feel and behave more like a pencil. Whereas traditional styli slip around connected glass screens, a Rubberdium stylus has some hale to that that mimics the way a pencil drags across a piece of theme.

The style is as long every bit the Vu (5.5 inches) and is every bit thick as the intermediate No. 2 pencil. The Vu's stylus is made of a lightweight metal (most likely aluminum) and is comfortable to grip and write with. The stylus can too be wont to voyage the phone's screen, only you're probably fortunate fitting using your digit.

By pressing the aforementioned QuickClip key out along the whirligig of the phone and entering memo mode, you'll be able to mark up some concealment you're currently on. So if you were looking at a PowerPoint intro on your phone and wanted to pen some notes on it, you could just move over the QuickClip key a tap, progress to your notes using the stylus (or your finger), and economize the cover to your Art gallery.

The one complaint I hold, though, is that you have no more agency of storing the stylus when you aren't using it. The Coltsfoot Note has a slot where you can fund its stylus when not in use; the Vu doesn't. Your only option is to sway the Vu's stylus around separately, making IT another thing that can easily be lost while traveling.

Glasses and Performance

Figure flaws aside, the rest of the call is quite impressive. The Vu is powered by a 1.5GHz two-fold-Congress of Racial Equality Snapdragon C.P.U. and has 1GB of RAM, both of which keep the earpiece running buttery-smooth. The ring was quite a responsive to my meet, and I noticed little or no lag when scrolling through with menus OR flying around WWW pages. I played a hardly a games of Temple Run without any issues, and even more-intensive games like Minecraft: Pocket book did little to slow the telephone down.

Because the phone is currently obtainable simply in Korea (and I lacked a compatible SIM card), I was not able to test the Vu's claim quality or download speeds over LTE. I was, however, able to test the Vu's NFC capabilities. The Vu comes with two premade NFC tags that let you change your settings on the fly just by tapping your phone to the tag. Tapping your phone to the "Office" tag, for example, turns hit the phone's ringer, turns on Wi-Fi, and puts the phone on vacillate. You can rewrite the tags using the included LG Tag+ app, and creating your own tag is as wanton as selecting the actions that you'd like to occur from a basic menu. In any case toggling doomed settings (look-alike the GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and information), you give notice also create an NFC tag that launches a specific app.

The 2100mAh shelling on the Vu is not removable. Though I didn't do any formal tests on the Vu's stamp battery lifespan, I managed to begin around 6 hours out of the earphone while doing things like browsing the Internet over Wi-Fi, drawing on the screen, and playacting a few games of Temple Endure. We'll update this news report later, erst we have run the Vu through our suite of official PCWorld battery tests.

Software

The Vu we received ran Android 2.3.6, with a custom LG overlay. The overlay is similar to ones we've seen happening previous LG Android phones, and features things like a notice center and seven home screens that you can rearrange at will. LG has said that the Vu would be upgraded to Android Icecream Sandwich sometime in June, though at this writing we still have not received the update.

Apart from the memo musical mode, the only other pen-centric application on the Vu is the Notebook computer app. This app lets you make up notebooks where you can get out, contain notes, add photos, and enter text. You can have aggregate notebooks—each with its own extend—and you prat share notebooks through email. Unhappily, the app is super clunky, and flipping from one notebook page to other was excruciatingly slow. The Notebook app has a magnifying feature that lets you draw minute details, but IT can represent vexed to apply—I plant it frustrating.

Many of the other apps that came preinstalled happening the Vu were in Korean, a language that I am sadly not proficient in. Some of the apps (suchlike the T Store Playscript eReader app) looked useful, but more others seemed nothing more than bloatware.

Entertainment

While couldn't test the TV and radio tuner on the Vu, I did play a few of my own videos on the phone. The two movies I played on the Vu were recorded at 720p and looked good playacting on the Vu's 5-inch display. Some movies were widescreen and played back just as they would on an iPad or a standard-definition television.

The music player along the Vu is slimly better than the stock one on Android Gingerbread, and is reminiscent of the music player connected Samsung's phones. Music played through the rear speaker measured, honestly, tinny and terrible. If you plan to use the Vu as your primary medicine player, you'll want to consumption either the included pair of headphones (which I liked) or your own. The Vu lacks expandable memory, just ships with 32GB of internal memory, for music, videos, photos, and files.

Cameras

The Vu has two cameras: A 1.3-megapixel front-facing tv camera and an 8-megapixel camera along the back. Pictures taken with the rear camera came out looking at dull, with colours being not as nippy as they would be in real life. The front-facing camera wasn't such better, but it did have an interesting shooting mode that lets you essentially airbrush your face when attractive photos. The strength of the effect crapper atomic number 4 adjusted through the menu—though even at the worst setting the software successful my face look creepy.

The phone is capable of shot videos in 1080p, and the few videos I scene using the Vu came out looking pretty good. A minor gelatin effect appeared when I moved the telephone (causing the camera to momentarily fall back focus), but overall the picture quality was above average compared with other phones I've recently proved. I can't say the same for the audio frequency in the videos, which measured as if it were coming in through a metal pipe. Voices in exceptional seemed distant, and I detected a discrete hiss in the playback of all the videos I took using the Vu.

Bottom Line

Though LG has no current plans to bring the Optimus Vu to the United States, information technology's forever newsworthy to review phones from other countries. I like the idea of the Vu—a smartphone large adequate to exercise as a digital notepad—but I wanted more. The phone's performance is upside-notch (though I hind end't speak for its send for quality), and the Rubberdium style worked well decent that I would like to see other styli utilise similar technology. Yes, the tv camera is mediocre, but it's usable for taking pictures for Instagram surgery Facebook, and the video quality wasn't half bad. Unfortunately it all comes rearward to the Vu's awkward, difficult-to-hold design.

So how does the Vu compare to the Galaxy Note? While I favor the Vu in overall performance, the Note is still the better phone—largely because it doesn't feel like a magnanimous phone. The boxy nature of the Vu makes it feel huge—something that you really don't want in a smartphone. I want to see much phablets in the future (I'm a fan of styli), but I Leslie Townes Hope future grand-riddle phones won't require Hulk-sized hands.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/465538/lg_optimus_vu_review_an_impressive_phone_held_back_by_clumsy_design.html

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