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With a trending series of phablets as seen in the past year, LG too had launched the Optimus Vu for 34,500. The LG Optimus Vu is a 5-inch smart phone with a fairly uncommon 4:3 aspect ratio. But what about it’s performance? Is it worth the price? Let’s get through with all questions in a detailed review.

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Box contents:

The retail package of the device consists of the handset, charger, usb cable, in-ear headset with extra ear plugs, NFC tags and two user manuals.

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Build:

The device weighs 168g and measures 139.6 x 90.4 x 8.5 mm. Surprisingly lighter than what was expected with this unusual form factor.

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We have the 1.3MP secondary camera, the earpiece above the LG logo and the four capacitive touch buttons and a 5inch IPS LCD display on the front.

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The top resides the power key, micro USB port, the quick memo button a secondary microphone and the 3.5mm audio out jack.

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On the left, we have the micro sim card slot and the microphone on the bottom and volume rocker on the right.

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The 8MP camera and the LED flash on the clean textured back with the LG logo in the middle and loud speaker on the lower bottom

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90.4 mm is too wide for a good hold, it feels quite big in hands. This phablet cannot be used by a single hand unless you really have some big hands.

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Hardware:

The device runs on a Nvdia Tegra 3 chipset which has Quad-core 1.5 GHz processor with 1GB RAM and ULP GeForce GPU. It has a sharp 16M colors capacitive 5-inch HD IPS LCD touch screen display with 768×1024 pixels resolution (256 ppi). The colour saturation levels on this display is very good with great viewing makes it perfect for web browsing and photo viewing experience.
It is available with an internal memory of 32GB with no additional support for microSD. This might not be an issue for most of users as 32GB is enough. The smart phone is powered by 2100 mAh standard Li-Ion non-removable battery which can suffice just a day on normal usage with this big screen.

Performance:

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Software:

The device runs on Android 4.0.4 with plans to upgrade for Jelly bean that is Android v4.1, for those wondering but we all know how lazy LG is at providing updates. So we should expect this will take a while unless the android developers at xda come out with something.

LG_Vu_screenshot_INSTALL_OR_NOT1  LG_Vu_screenshot_INSTALL_OR_NOT7  LG_Vu_screenshot_INSTALL_OR_NOT21Alike Samsung’s Touchwiz and HTC’s Sense, LG too has its custom UI layer on top of Android which has the multiple home screens, customizable app drawer and dock and supports three different themes too. Fortunately LG haven’t installed much stock apps and those included are relatively useful like yahoo weather, file share, yahoo finance, news, notebook etc.

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The wide aspect ratio has enhanced the keyboard typing experience more with proper spacing between the keys.

The dedicated quick memo button on the top makes the current screen accessible for editing with the stylus or normal touch.

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Alike the Galaxy Note, LG Vu also has a stylus which they call the ‘Rubberdium’ but the lack of any slot on the phone makes people completely forget about it.

Camera:

The device has a 8MP camera at the back with LED flash which we found to be very usable. The 8 mega pixel camera takes natural photos with accurate colours. The camera has the options for HDR and panorama too. It can shoot videos upto 720p with the rate 30 frames per second. There is an 1.3MP camera on the front top which we find good enough for normal video chat. Tap to focus is quick and adjusting ISO, scene mode and white balance results in decent clicks from the phablet.

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Conclusion:

The phone-o-tab looks pretty in hands. Inspite of having a quad-core processor it lags a little or maybe we are too used to Jellybean that we find previous versions laggy :p The stylus powered applications like quick memo with the dedicated button for the same is a good move by LG. The 4:3 aspect ratio even though being first if its kind does not solve any purpose but we would love the same bright display on a 16:9 aspect ratio. We’ll suggest One X or S3 for the same price range or Note 2 if you are looking for a phablet indeed.

[easyreview title=”Install or Not Scorecard” cat1title=”Hardware” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”4.5″ cat2title=”Performance” cat2detail=”” cat2rating=”4.0″ cat3title=”Design” cat3detail=”” cat3rating=”2.5″ cat4title =”Value for money” cat4detail=”” cat4rating=”3.5″ summary=””]


Image courtesy : Pictures clicked by the Samsung Galaxy Camera