In the smartphone scene, there are only a handful of niche devices available in the market and the Samsung Galaxy Note is one of them. Released in US shores by AT&T earlier this year, the phablet has become one of the hottest selling devices in the lineup of the carrier. And being the niche device that it is, the Samsung phablet has almost non-existent competition which further explained its popularity among the smartphone buying population.
However, the reign of the Samsung phablet is about to get threatened with the entry of another South Korean product in the form of the Optimus Vu from LG. Similar to the Samsung Galaxy Note, the LG Optimus Vu is also a niche device in the “bigger than a smartphone, smaller than a tablet” category with its massive screen real estate.
And just recently, we got wind of the news that the LG Optimus Vu is scheduled to land in US shores this quarter. Looking back, the device was on a limited release in Asian markets which explained as to why it hasn’t made that much of a mark yet in the smartphone competition although LG confirmed that it already managed to sell a half million units of its LG Optimus Vu in South Korea.
However, a US released could change all that – which is what exactly LG has planned with the supposed release of the LTE version of the LG Optimus Vu in our side of the world. The only problem is there hasn’t been any confirmation yet as to which wireless provider in the US will actually release the device. There were speculations in the past that Verizon will have the LG Optimus Vu added on to its lineup of Android-powered smartphones and a couple of Verizon-branded Optimus Vu mug shots recently surfaced but the carrier is yet to make an official announcement regarding this.
As of the moment, things are still pretty much unclear with regard to this so we caution everybody to take all of this with a grain of salt while we wait for Verizon to come clean about the matter at hand. If it ever will, that is.
As for the LG Optimus Vu, the device reached official status when it was announced by LG back in February and was released in several Asian markets a month later. The circuitry of the device is built around its QualComm MSM8660 SnapDragon chipset and this SoC brings to the LG Optimus Vu a dual-core 1.5 Ghz Scorpion processor and a full gigabyte of RAM. The internal storage of the device is pegged at 32GB but there is no option to have this expanded display-wise, the LG Optimus Vu comes with a 5.0-inch HD-IPS LCD capacitive multitouch panel with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels while its camera department features a rear-facing 8MP shooter capable of 1080p video recording and a 1.3MP front-facing video call camera.
