Detailed Review
Design:
VU is LG’s amazing innovation and is surely a great device. Its glossy white front and its textured back cover give this device a good grip and attractive look. The handsets dimensions 139.6 mm x 90.4 mm x 8.5 mm in height, width and depth. The VU has 5 inch screen size in HD-IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen technology. The screen resolution is XGA 1024 x 768 pixels and the display really pops out from the screen. This Phablet offers 4:3 aspect ratio assuring easy viewing and great display. But again the major drawback with such device/Phablet is their size, because of which it do not fits the standard pockets size and hard to carry while walking. The good part of VU is its light weight of 168 gm despite its size and shape. But it is hard to operate this phone with one hand as it’s big and slim too. These couple of things and its price can distract the customers from this lovely device. As people generally believe, “the bigger the better”, this phone stands to the saying. One can enjoy the videos, images, notes, etc.
The controls of the phone are easy and the keys are well placed. The left side hold the Volume key whereas, the right side hold the sim slot with cover over it. On its top is a 3.5 mm earjack, USB/charging connector, dedicated Quick Memo key and the power key. The back panel hold the main 8 megapixels camera with Led flash to its next and speaker grill towards the below portion. Above the screen are front facing camera and sensors. And below the screen are four front keys menu, home, back, and search.
Interface/OS:
LG VU runs on Android 4.0 ICS (Ice cream Sandwich) platform and might we see it upgrading to 4.1 Jelly Bean. LG has used its latest TouchWiz 4.0, which is easy and classy. It’s easy doing multitasking and swapping between applications. Just pinch in on the home screen and one can easily customize/personalize the seven home screens to their choice.
Features:
The VU comes with a 1.5GHz Quad Core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and comes in-built with some strong features that take it ahead from other smartphones in the race. Some important features are: Rubbebdium Pen, NFC support (3 Tags), alarm clock, application manager, finance, gmail, google+, latitude, LG TV, maps, memo, messenger, navigation, news, places, play shop, polaris office, remote call service, smart share, LG Smart world, Talk, Weather and YouTube. The Rubbebdium Pen feels like regular pen or a HB pencil we can say. The advantage of this pen is its grip and hold in hand whereas, the drawback of Rubbebdium Pen is that it cannot be fit into the device and has to carry separately.
Camera/Video:
LG VU has an 8 megapixel CMOS main with LED flash light and it also has a 2 megapixel front facing camera. LG has come up with couple of good features for camera like Time machine camera, HDR, Panorama, Continuous shot and Beauty Shot with which, one can e-mail or text an image to the person one tags in it. It has 8X digital Zoom and it features Auto Focus, Flash, Smile Detection, Blink Detection and Anti-Shake. When tested, the camera showed great results and the images captured were rich in colours and light. The indoor shots with artificial lights were even true.
The Video quality is also amazing. The sound/audio comes in loud and clear, colours remain sharp and crisp. It plays back the video uninterrupted/smoothly that we shoot. And even same with the downloaded videos. The front camera used for video calling functions smoothly and gives loud and clear voice to the receiver.
Call quality:
Calls made by Note were loud and clear. But, on speaker mode the sound was low and hard to hear. In high sound places such as market or eateries the sound come soft but the quality remains good.
Data speed:
The 3G data speed is fast and blazing. It delivers uninterrupted downloading, with no need to wait for buffering to complete and hassle free web browsing.
Audio/Video:
The in-built music player is simply superb and comes with Dolby mobile sound enhancement. It will give you good sound with pleasure to your ears and supports multiple audio formats. The video quality is good and rich with colours and sharpness and video formats comes with multiple support. It gives you HD 1080 pixels resolution at 30 frames per second with LED video light. It has continuous auto focus, video light and video stabilizer.
Memory:
With inbuilt 32 GB of memory LG VU assures you to get most of your data saved and 1 GB RAM helps multitasking and swapping applications. But, lacking in the trend of more memory space, it comes with no micro SD card slot.
Battery:
It has a 2080 mAh battery, which is massive, which has done justice with the device. Battery life is good and even fair on 3G. The stand by time delivered when tested was up to 480 hours on 2G and 435 hours on 3G. The Talk time it gave when on test was up to 7.15 hours on 2G and up to 5.5 hours on 3G.
Conclusion:
With a large number of excellent features and functions, LG VU has set a benchmark for its close competitors. Its 1.5 Dual Core ARM NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and 1 GB RAM has worked well with the device. With its forceful promotion strategy, LG VU has an advantage over rivals. But, the price of the device and the Rubbebdium Pen is not satisfactory and might distract audience. We consider it one of the best high end phones.
We give this phone 4.5 star rating.
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