LG - Vu Cell Phone Review

This is my review of the LG VU CU920 phone, which I bought from AT&T with a 2 year plan for my business & personal use.

I guess you could call this a psuedo "smart" phone (wannabe iPhone...as close as you might be able to get for the cost). It's the first phone I bought that has a full HTML browser, camera, and large display touch screen.

The phone is a very sleek, candybar style shape in a glossy piano black finish. Some folks thought that the phone was slippery and felt cheap. Even though the phone's case is mostly plastic, I'd have to strongly disagree. The weight of the phone is significant enough to know that you have it in your pocket, and it feels comfortable in my hands, it was a bit slick at first, but once you get used to holding it, it becomes more comfortable and familiar.

As for rugged-ness/durabily, I'd say it's a tough model.  As a klutz, I can testify to dropping tons of crap.  I've dropped this phone about 4 times since I got it (two of those times, it was on hard stone tile in my kitchen) and it barely got scratched (one tiny dent on the back of the phone).

On the right side of the phone is the data/charger/headphone port, the volume rocker button, the screen lock button, and the camera shutter.

The touchscreen can get full of fingerprints, and you notice this right away, but after some months of use, it seems trivial and not as noticable. Vinyl diecut screens are available for pennies onlnie at eBay or other places online, anyway, if you are really serious about keeping the touchscreen safe.

The touchscreen has haptic feedback (vibration) which tells you when you've touched something, and that's plain awesome, coming from someone like me who is actually highly dexterous. Even if you have meaty fingertips, the touch keys are very easy to use (with the exception of the Qwerty keyboard, that is--which are a bit smaller and although it's faster to use most times, you wind up backspacing a lot due to the smaller screen keys).

The screen is a 3.5 display which is wonderfully crisp and a delight to view. The time and date can be set to either digital or analog and the font size, contrast and colors can all be adjusted, as with the wallpaper and theme color. Brightness of the screen can be adjusted, though your chances of viewing the screen clearly in bright sunlight are slim to none most of the time.

The sound on the music player could be a bit louder when listening via headphones, as you can still hear the noises around you, and I found the ear parts of the headphones to be so large that they fall out of my ear so much that it's a pain to use them. But I'll be buying an adapter to fit the ear inserts with smaller rubber plugs so that they fit my small ear canals better.

I like that there is a lot of storage space on the phone, so far I've jammed more than 100 high res photos on it, a few dozen songs a handful of free games and apps, like a version of Tetris, Google Maps & GMail, plus a digital clock app (which I can jump to when doing things on the phone that prevent me from seeing the time), and more. There is NO micro SD card included, you need to buy that separately. The other pain about this is that you have to remove the back latch cover, then the battery, then the card slot is below that.

On to the browser. The mobile browser is pretty awesome, considering it shows full HTML web pages fairly well, and loads them quickly (for most web sites). I can view web pages as they should look, instead of mobile-style (plain text), it's like a tiny replica of the website! Plus I love the ability to scroll with my finger through web pages instead of having to click page 1-2-3, etc. However, scrolling with my finger doesn't always work well when trying to use the scroll bar on longer web sites, so I recommend using the volume rocker bar for up & down scrolling on the longer sites, since the scroll bar button becomes so tiny you can barely grab it on the touch screen with your finger.

The browser's bookmarks feature allows you to access sites you regularly visit, and it's easy to rename the name/link of the site if you need to, which I sometimes found on other phones to be impossible, making it hard for me to remember the site without visiting it first (like 2 sites that say "Home" or "Online games").

I found mobile sites like Yahoo, Wired.com, Facebook, Twitter, etc. a breeze to use on my phone, and actually I use Twitter.com most ofen if I want to Tweet via mobile (instead of Tweeting via text). I mean, I COULD add Twitter.com to my phone via SMS if I wanted to, but that costs out of my available text messaging bank, which I don't use much, except for one or two people I know who don't talk on the phone much, but would text all the time.

So far, I really like this phone's features, especially the FloTV feature. I can watch several TV channels (ESPN, Fox, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Nickelodeon, and more, all in very high quality video and audio playback. 

Oops, I almost forgot to mention the camera! The LG VU has a 2.0 megapixel camera, and although flash is really desired for night shots and low-light shots, it works wonderfully for someone who has no camera to speak of.  The only thing I do not really like about the camera is the lack of flash.  When you are in a low-light environment, you have to switch to night mode on the camera, which can slow down candid shooting of photos at an event.

You can see a couple photos I took below, for examples of the quality of photos you get with the camera on this phone... plenty of people (at Best Buy, etc.) will try to convince you, as a consumer that 2.0 megapixels isn't enough. that's a load of bull. For the average photo taker, 2.0 is more than plenty. If you're not trying to design a billboard or fancy poster, you don't need more than that. As a web designer, I can safely say these photos are high-resolution enough for me. I've had lots of people as what camera I've used when they see the photos online, and they are surprised to learn that I took the pics with a phone camera. Pretty awesome quality, I'd say.

For someone like me, who was traditionally not into fancy phones with things like mp3 players, cameras, etc., I was pretty sure I'd never need any of these things in a cell phone. I'm 36 but I always acted like some old fuddy duddy and said, "I just need a phone that I can use to call people and maybe check my e-mail, THAT'S IT!".  I guess now I would have to say that I'm a bit spoiled after experiencing the LG VU.  I know I'll use this phone for a long time, at least until perhaps I upgrade to AT&T G4 or 5, whenever that happens (I live under a rock most of the time when it comes to wireless news, phone stuff, etc. so if it happened already, forgive me).

All in all, it's an awesome phone!