LG OPTIMUS Vu : LG P895

PUT YOUR THOUGHTS IN OPTIMAL 4:3 VIEW

After the success of the Galaxy Note 2 has spurred a lot of manufacturers to come up with smartphones with massive and brilliant touch displays. Although Samsung was the first successful brand to do this but still the credit goes to the ill fated Dell Streak. And after such a popular device we suddenly have such a huge competition in the 5 - inch and above market. So here we have another player from LG it is the Optimus Vu.

One of these is the Optimus Vu from LG. Like Samsung LG has decided to go a step ahead and instead of giving a large display copy Samsung and give in a Stylus also, which is bundled with the device along with applications to make use of it.

Perhaps the biggest difference is the Ratio off 4:3 aspect ratio, unlike Note it is not long but wide.

Review :

Design

Thanks to the Large Size and Proportions, the Optimus Vu has no trouble standing out from the crowd. It's not often that you come around a phone that is almost square.

The Design And Shape is Hardly Noteworthy. The Design is same as the 4X HD, but still has some interesting details, such as a silver ring around the front edge, exposed screws at the bottom and thin strips of grille on the top and bottom other wise the design is still quite bland.

 Going around the phone we have Volume Rockers on the right, Micro SIM card slot on the left, headphone jack, Micro USB port, Power Button and Quick Memo Button on the top. The Quick Memo button lets you instantly inscribe notes on whichever screen you currently are on and then save that as an image for further reference. On the back of the phone there is a 8 Mega Pixel Camera with LED Flash. The battery is sealed and cannot be removed.

Build wise the Optimus Vu is Great. The phone feels quite sturdy in hand and something that can take falls.

As far as ergonomics is concerned, LG has completely lost it. If you think that the Note felt awkward in hand then think again and stay away from LG Optimus Vu. Having a 4:3 aspect ratio display, especially of this size has made the phone unnecessarily wide and no matter how enormous your hands are you simply cannot reach the other edge of the device. And this is when you hold your phone like a tablet. If you wrap your fingers around the other edge, then your thumb would have a hard time reaching the center of the display.

There are other problems with the device as well. LG has supplied a capacitive stylus with the device, but there is no slot on the phone to put it in. The stylus has to be carried separately or connected to the device with a lanyard. LG pulled this same thing with the viewty all those years and it's sad that the company hasn't learned anything after all this time, especially in the face of such stiff competition.

Display

The Optimus Vu has a 5 inch, 1024 X 768 resolution TFT LCD. On the paper the display resolution appears lower than the competition, who have been offering HD displays for a while now. But going ahead than the paper, The display looks absolutely fine in practice. The quality of the panel is also superb and images look quite fantastic, from a variety of viewing angles and the display remains visible in bright light.

The problem comes again on the aspect ratio, that it is shorter than the competition so it displays less information than the others. For ex. - If the Gmail Application shows 6 mails on this it will show 8 to 9 mails with large font on the Galaxy S3.

Another area in which Samsung dropped the ball is the poor implementation of the stylus. Whereas Samsung went the whole hog of having a Wacom digitizer integrated into the device for precise stylus input with multi level pressure sensitivity, only that is more precise than using your finger. That, coupled with the fact that you can't really store the stylus anywhere in the device, means you will end up leaving the stylus up in the box as you will be scared to lose it so did we.

Hardware and Software

The Optimus Vu has the same Hardware as the Optimus 4X HD. The SoC is an Nvidia Tegra 3, witha quad-core CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz and GeForce GPU, paired with 1 GB of RAM. The Optimus Vu also has a generous 32 GB of internal memory but no option to expand it further.

On the software side the Optimus Vu runs on Android 4.0.4, far from the latest version of Android, with LG's custom skins go, LG is one of the better one's out there in the Market. The icon design isn't particularly great but pretty functional as per us.

The Optimus Vu comes with a drawing application that you can use along with the stylus. The application comes with a fair amount of options to take care of basic drawing or note taking needs but isn't as extensive as the application as on the Galaxy Note 2.

Performance

Considering there is a fairly respectable quad-core processor running in there, the Optimus Vu manages to chug along just fine. In day to day activities the phone feels smooth enough and you are not really wanting for more power.

The things Get all dirty while in Games as with these specifications Games should run just fine but they do surely give a Lag and the game gets chippy, not really sure why is this happening.

And due to the aspect ratio some games go into landscape mode to cover up the areas and most of the controls end up outside the phone.

Camera

 The camera on the Optimus Vu seems to be same 8 megapixel unit that we saw on the Optimus 4X HD. As with the image quality is quite acceptable in most situations but not as good as the Cameras on the Samsung Smart Phones.

Battery Life

At 2,100 mAh, the Optimus Vu has nearly the same battery as the Optimus 4X HD. However, it seems because of the lower resolution display, the Optimus Vu does not end up being nearly as bad. With a full charge, you can get through most on the Optimus Vu, which is about what you get from most smartphones these days.

Verdict

It's hard to see the Optimus Vu as anything other than a me too product by LG along the lines of the Galaxy Note. What's Bad is that LG, instead of choosing to improve upon the Galaxy Note, Chose to go in the other direction and mess about things that Samsung got right with the Note.

The display for start, does not make any sense at all. It does not add value to the product and only makes it more difficult to use. The stylus implementation is also so lazy it makes you wonder why lg bothered with it at all. And the rest of the phone is nothing to write about either.

AT $510, the Optimus Vu is slightly cheaper than the Galaxy Note 2 which costs around $ 674 and the original Note of around $550. But the fact that despite being more expensive and a year old the original Note is better than the Optimus Vu that shows how badly LG messed up here.