Design flaws aside, the rest of the phone is quite impressive. The Vu is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and has 1GB of RAM, both of which keep the phone running buttery-smooth. The phone was quite responsive to my touch, and I noticed little or no lag when scrolling through menus or flying around Web pages. I played a few games of Temple Run without any issues, and even more-intensive games like Minecraft: Pocket Edition did little to slow the phone down.

Because the phone is currently available only in Korea (and I lacked a compatible SIM card), I was not able to test the Vu's call quality or download speeds over LTE. I was, however, able to test the Vu's NFC capabilities. The Vu comes with two premade NFC tags that let you change your settings on the fly simply by tapping your phone to the tag. Tapping your phone to the "Office" tag, for example, turns off the phone's ringer, turns on Wi-Fi, and puts the phone on vibrate. You can rewrite the tags using the included LG Tag+ app, and creating your own tag is as easy as selecting the actions that you'd like to occur from a basic menu. Besides toggling certain settings (like the GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and data), you can also create an NFC tag that launches a specific app.

The 2100mAh battery on the Vu is not removable. Though I didn't perform any formal tests on the Vu's battery life, I managed to get around 6 hours out of the phone while doing things like browsing the Internet over Wi-Fi, drawing on the screen, and playing a few games of Temple Run. We'll update this story later on, once we have run the Vu through our suite of official PCWorld battery tests.