LG View

The LG Vu CU920 is the closest thing to an iPhone competitor I’ve ever seen. Just like the iPhone it shares the same essence of fun while using digital device to touch beautiful things to get entertained or connect with friends. Vu feels kinda same like Prada, which in turn looks and feels like a little bit thicker iPhone.

3 inch Touch screen is prety responsive and fun to use, thats because Vu touch screen is rather finger-friendly unlike for instance LG’s VX10000 Voyages or HTC Touch. User interface mainly consists of Big, beautiful icons and scroll bars that fits the size of your fingers, letting you easily scroll through menus at a comfortable pace. When you want to enter text, you’ve two options: a full QWERTY keyboard that pops up and enlarges each letter as you touch them, or a virtual keypad with phone-like multi-tapping. However the Vu lacks ability to auto correct your input mistakes. Both virtual keypads provide responsive feedback with a vibration each time you touch a key, making it more usable than for instance iPhone’s virtual keypad.

Vu’s home screen offers four buttons at the bottom of the screen: Main Menu, Mobile TV, Contacts, and Dial Pad. If you enable the Shortcuts Menu, you could also get Messaging, Music,Web Browsing, and IM on home screen. Open up the main menu and you will see icons separated into three tabs: Phone and Messaging, Music and Video, and Tools and Settings. It’s simple as that.

Vu, just like the iPhone isn’t the number one voice phone. It’s loud and has support for voice dialing, but there is a noticeable sizzle behind calls, and while testing, network reception wasn’t perfect. There’s no 3.5 mm audio output jack, but you can use proprietary jack, which is the same as on most popular LG cell phones, so you shouldn’t find a problem while looking for adapter. Bluetooth headset pairs fine, and the voice dialing is simple to use and can be activated over the Bluetooth. As of battery life, over 4 hours of talking time is a good result for a 3G mobile phone.

This model approaches entertainment kinda different than the iPhone. The iPhone is all about connecting to your computer and becaming a part of it. The Vu offers AT&T’s Mobile TV service with ten channels of true digital TV. Although the service isn’t free, you have to sign up for the service and pay $15 for every month. As soon as you sign up, you can pop out the 5" antenna from the LG mobile phone and touch the TV button. You can also use phone’s browser to surf to YouTube Mobile and pass some time watching funny videos or listening to music videos. As of listening you can use Bluetooth stereo headphones or regular wired ones.

You can load your microSD card with music and play them through music player. Maximum supported size of card is 4 GB and the music player supports both MP3 and WMA. If you have LG USB cable (which isn’t in the phone package, so you have to buy it seperately), you can sync your playlists or protected WMA content from Windows Media Player 11 to your LG mobile phone.

Just like the Apple’s iPhone, the LG Vu mobile phone also offers a rich Internet experience. The Vu’s 3G HSDPA network is around three times faster than iPhone’s EDGE, while it’s a little bit slower than Wi-Fi. The Vu’s full browser renders regular Web pages without problems, including password-dependent sites like Gmail. You can also zoom in and out and in again. The browser has full-screen and landscape modes that you can switch between by pressing just a single button. You can also use Vu as a modem for your computer, I got speed of around 700 KB/s. Modem access works both via Bluetooth and cable.

Instant messaging and e-mail applications are a little bit disappointing. E-mail application works only with Yahoo!, AOL and MSN, but strangely lacks support for Gmail. There’s also no support for POP3/IMAP accounts or e-mail attachments. Instant messaging client runs in background and supports AIM, Yahoo! and MSN. It also lacks support for capturing your full AIM buddy list, you can only see those buddies who are marked as "mobile".

The 2 megapixel camera isn’t fancy at all. It incorporates autofocus and video recording at 320 x 240 pixels resolution, but only at 9 frames per second, so the videos are unsteady, and stills are occasionally blurry, with bright highlights blown out.

For such an entertaining LG mobile phone, it’s really shocking to find out that it doesn’t socialise with your PC well. You can’t synchronise your contacts or calendar. And on top of that to get the USB cable that you need to sync your music, you currently have to go to a Verizon store, which is absurd.

Another thing that LG forgot about is decent support for Java. You can run Java programs, though not speedily. AT&T has lamed the phone so that if you install an application which wasn’t purchased directly from AT&T, you have to click through nagging screen every single time your application wants access to the Web, nots just single time for every run of a program, but for every single request of data. This makes third-party email programs, instant mesaging applications and Web browsers worthless.

The LG mobile phone isn’t quite as sleek as the iPhone. But that was a close one. Ultimately, low quality Internet options and lack of syncing with PC was the main reasons why I would choose to wouch for Apple’s iPhone over LG Vu. iPhone successfully acts as a hybrid of iPod and PDA because it extends your PC media and personal information to your pocket, and surfing the Web using Safari is really gorgeous. The Vu doesn’t quite step up to that level, although it is cheaper and offers built in in features like instant messaging, and stereo Bluetooth headset, which would make iPhone a killer. If you find yourself enjoying to watch live episodes of Jay Leno or Neil Cavuto on your LG mobile phone, or if you want a fun mobile phone and have an allergy for Apple this is the best option for you. As of the name “iPhone killer”? Not quite there yet.

Specifications

• Dimensions: 108 x 55 x 13 mm
• Weight: 90 g
• Display: 3" 262K colours TFT touchscreen
• Camera: 2 megapixels
• Memory: 150 MB
• Battery: 1000 mAh
• Supported formats by audio player: MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, EAAC+
• Supported formats by video player: MPEG4, 3GPP