LG Intuition Review (2 of 2)

By Brad Molen

Camera

The leaf (Intuition) didn't fall far from the tree (Optimus Vu) with its camera: both devices take advantage of 8-megapixel sensors in the rear and 1.3MP in the front, and the pair are both capable of capturing video up to 1080p resolution. They both offer the same array of settings: ISO, white balance, color effect, plenty of scene modes and brightness adjustments. Panorama is also available, but HDR capabilities are nowhere to be found. We were also saddened that we weren't able to hold down the shutter button to lock exposure and / or focus.

We took images with the Intuition, Optimus Vu and Samsung Galaxy Note (AT&T, upgraded to ICS) side-by-side and both LG devices offer roughly the same amount of detail, though there were a few shots in which the Intuition prevailed over the Vu with slightly better color saturation and dynamic range. Neither one, however, could match up against the 8MP sensor on the Galaxy Note -- the Samsung phone snapped images with more saturated and realistic colors (the LGs appeared to be more washed-out) and was the clear winner in dynamic range. It did better in close-up shots as well. For daylight shots, the Intuition's camera isn't terrible -- it just doesn't compete with its phablet competitor.

LG Intuition sample shots

LG Optimus Vu sample shots

Though it's a decent shooter during the day, we can't say the same about its performance at night -- or in any low-light situation, for that matter. In addition to taking grainy and noisy shots in these situations, it simply can't draw in enough backlight to do any good -- even when the settings are switched to night mode. The LED flash, while sufficiently bright, could be a little better if the camera used the light to focus before taking the final picture.

If you're hoping for better performance out of the video capture, you'll be greatly disappointed. Again, the 1080p HD quality matches that of the Optimus Vu in that we have a hard time even calling it high-definition. While the Intuition did a decent job at capturing motion, it was incredibly grainy no matter what time of day the footage was taken at. We even noticed the camcorder lose focus on occasion. Audio was also below average, as some of our movies sounded a little muffled. Results at 720p were about the same, so it almost makes sense to simply opt for the lower-res setting just to conserve storage space.

Performance and battery life

We've noticed that one key category has been the subject of much mystery and confusion: the SoC. The original Optimus Vu features a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S3 MSM8660 processor paired with an Adreno 220 GPU, and there has been much speculation that the Intuition was upgraded to an S4. (None of the official spec sheets say for sure.) We wouldn't have been terribly surprised if this were the case -- even the Optimus Vu itself got a generous bump up to a quad-core Tegra 3 over the course of time.

Not so with the LG Intuition, sadly. The answer wasn't so easy to find; despite surfing through an onslaught of system diagnostic tests, we couldn't get a straight answer on the exact chipset used. Instead, each one told us the same thing: the Intuition features a MSM8X60 chip. That missing digit is somewhat crucial to solving the S3 / S4 puzzle, naturally, but we also discovered that the phone uses an Adreno 220 GPU -- the graphical processor of choice for S3 chips. Indeed, what we have here is in fact a MSM8660, the same 45nm silicon found in the first Optimus Vu in addition to the HTC Rezound, EVO 3D and AT&T's flavor of the Samsung Galaxy Note. In other words, the Intuition is in great company... with last year's high-end phones (or early this year, in the case of the AT&T Note).

Certainly, this fact led us to initially assume that the performance of the two phones would be virtually identical to one another. The duo has more commonalities than differences, after all. Let's take a quick look at the benchmarks to see how they hold up. Just for the sake of comparison with similarly specced devices, we also threw in the AT&T Galaxy Note.

	LG Intuition	LG Optimus Vu	Samsung Galaxy Note (AT&T)
Quadrant	3,648	2,990	3,735
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)	2,214	2,339	2,665
Vellamo (v1.0)	1,383	963	1,328
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps)	32	34	34
CF-Bench	6,168	6,021	6,506
AnTuTu	6,841	6,588	6,628
SunSpider: lower scores are better. Tests were run on default browser.

As you can see, the Intuition benefits from a slight uptick in most benchmark scores, and we imagine this largely has to do with the fact it's running newer firmware. Still, these results won't hold a candle to what we typically see on the more common S4 chips. In real-life use, however, we didn't have many complaints -- everything ran smoothly with only an occasional hiccup. We were able to multitask easily and gaming was a breeze. Essentially, our experience with the Intuition was quite similar to that of the Optimus Vu. The only area we noticed lag in was the browser. While it didn't take very long to load pages, we experienced slow scrolling and a bit of tiling as the phone attempted to render images and text -- especially after zooming in and out.

One of our biggest concerns with the Optimus Vu was the battery life. A phone this large needs to have enough power behind it to make it last a respectable amount of time, but 2,080mAh simply wasn't enough to cut it. How about the Intuition? The battery hasn't changed, so it shouldn't come as much surprise that it performed pretty much the same way. While the Vu barely eked out a full five hours in our intensive video rundown stress test, the Intuition managed to get an extra hour of juice, totaling five hours and 58 minutes. When it comes to real-world usage, you'll be lucky to make this phone last a full 10-hour workday. It wasn't atypical for our unit to drain 20 percent in an hour and a half of web surfing and catching up on social media.

When it comes to making calls, we didn't run into any problems with dropped calls, static or volume. Frankly, as you might expect, the only real concern comes in gripping the phone and holding up to your ear. Yes, this is the kind of device that encourages the use of Bluetooth headsets, as the level of awkwardness is pretty high.

Despite sporting a set of mono speakers on the back, we were pleasantly surprised at the quality found therein. We found them to be plenty loud for our needs, but it's quite obvious that users who prefer to hold phones in their right hand will be frustrated by the speakers' location when using the Intuition in portrait mode. Since the speaker grille is placed in the lower-left corner of the phone's backside, it rests smack-dab in the palm of your right hand. This is sure to cause a significant amount of muffling. Using the device in landscape mode for movies, however, you likely won't run into this concern (provided you hold it so that the volume buttons face up, anyway).

As we mentioned earlier, the Intuition also comes with MHL compatibility. Plugging in the array of cables rewarded us with a "Media Home" screen, a simplified menu letting you choose between videos, pictures and music. There's also an exit button handy in case you're just in the mood for some casual HDMI mirroring. Everything looked and sounded great when we were hooked up.

The Intuition offers Bluetooth 3.0+HS, and putting it to the test we found we were able to pull down an average file transfer speed of 100-110 KB/s received and 80 KB/s sent. USB file transfers were quite a bit more varied: the phone received files at an average of 3.26 MB/s and sent them to our MacBook Pro at 14.07 MB/s. Finally, the GPS treated us quite well, locking an accurate location within 10 seconds and retaining an accuracy of less than 20 feet as we took the navigation system for a test drive.

Wrap-up

We'll admit that our gripes with the width of the Intuition is more of a matter of personal preference and the extra girth may suit folks just fine (provided you have gargantuan hands or simply enjoy the 4:3 aspect ratio too much) -- however, we'd be more willing to give it a pass if the device itself isn't a study in mediocrity. Unfortunately, our head-to-head showdown between it and the Galaxy Note II did nothing more than convince us that this isn't the phablet Verizon fans have been waiting for. Call it a glitch in the Matrix if you'd like, but we can't shake the feeling that we've seen this phone before.

Source: Engadget