Sam Biddle - 

LG’s Vu is offensive in virtually every way that an object can offend. It’s called the “Vu,” it has an abhorrent 4:3 screen, and, as BGR has loathsomely coined, it’s a “phablet”. Let it never leave Korean gadget hell.

Do you see the look in that woman’s eyes? Her pupils burn with hegemony, her arms—limbs of marketing girl hypnosis—seem to stretch out of my screen and into my face. Use this phablet. No. No, I never will, nor should any of you, ever. It should be confined to the lab from it was summoned through a demon’s womb, and sealed with concrete.

The Phablet—neither phone, nor tablet, nor moral—combines the worst aspect of everything you can possibly buy today. The 4:3 aspect ratio is obsolete; why make a screen that size? And at 5.3 inches, that display lacks the lovely monolithic nature of the still-huge-but-much-smaller 4.7-inch HTC Titan—a phone that luxuriates in its largeness, and a sane aspect ratio. But where the Titan is a glorious blonde Swede, the Vu is some sort of blocky troll-being, square to the point of uselessness.

Oh, but surely there’s something inside—something to justify the appearance of having pried a floor tile off of the ground to hold up to your ear. LG, please help? From our news post yesterday on the “phablet”:

The Optimus Vu apes the iPad with a 4:3 ratio IPS screen, but shrinks it down to just five-inches. It’s fairly well equipped with “Rubberdium” pen for stylus action, while a dual-core 1.5GHz processor is backed up by 1GB RAM, 32GB of storage and a 2,080mAh battery that should keep it chugging away nicely. It’s also got an eight-megapixel shooter on the back and a 1.3MP front-facing cam for video chat. There’s even an LTE-chipset in there for 4G-equipped markets (that’s not us), and it’s all crammed into a pretty svelte 8.5mm thick frame.

No.

No…

Specs as exciting as cornmeal for dinner. Gingerbread with a phantom promise of Ice Cream Sandwich. At least it has LTE for our American friends, so that the battery life will be mercifully poor.

This “phablet” isn’t made for people. It’s made to torment people. It’s a mockery of everything that makes technology empowering and fun and crazy. Sure, the Vu may be crazy—but it’s power-tripping substitute teacher crazy, not Wright brothers crazy. The Vu has somehow managed to create a device that’s a spectacle out of its stunning mediocrity, not design daring, a composite of everything lame and undesirable.

So please, people and business captains of Korea—we beg you, spare the rest of the world. If you keep sending us the really cool things you build, we’ll pretend this never happened. Phablet. Ugh. No. [BGR]