The iPad is so ubiquitous now, that it's easy to overlook that its 4:3 aspect ratio display could be considered rather quaint. While the vast majority of Android tablets have opted for a more video-friendly 16:9, the market leader has stuck with a ratio better suited to photography and digital versions of books and magazines.
LG has certainly had the same idea when it came to designing the LG Vu. Its 5in screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio with a 1,024x768 resolution - same as the iPad. This means that should be reading a digital copy of say our print sister-title Computer Shopper on Zinio, or browsing through some photos, there will be less wasted screen space. For the right applications then, that 5in screen is even bigger than its dimensions suggest.
The Vu, like Samsung's Galaxy 5.3in Note, adds a little bit of PDA into its smartphone-tablet hybrid. A dedicated 'QuickClip' button lets you annotate any screen, be it a map, a photo, or a webpage. You can then easily save or share the resulting image via the usual method.
There is an optional stylus, the fancily-titled Rubberdium, that makes your scrbbles far more accurate. However, it's not a serious doodling device - with pressure sensitivity - like that on the Samsung Galaxy Note.
The Vu feels very light for its size, especially given it has a whopping 2,100mAh battery inside. The leatherette style rear definitely draws style cues from LG's Prada-branded handsets, and combined with the small round silver buttons on the top gives the whole thing something of a retro appearance.
The IPS screen looks fantastic, with plenty of pixels and vibrant images. It has a whopping 32GB of storage built-in and a dual-core 1.5GHz processor. It's currently shipping with Android 2.3, but that may not be a problem for UK consumers.
Unfortunately the current model is LTE, and given the lack of an LTE network in the UK at present it wont be released on our shores just yet. The model we saw even had an extending antenna (like a portable radio) to pick up Korean T-DBM transmissions (a mobile TV standard) Plans are in the works for a 3G model though and so we should see the LG Vu in the UK later this year.
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