Verizon Announces LG’s Answer to The Galaxy Note in the Intuition

Verizon Wireless has officially announced pricing and availability details for LG’s attempt to match the popular Galaxy Note phone/tablet hybrid in the LG Intuition. The Intuition will be launched this Thursday for $199.99 after a new 2 year agreement, but has decided not to list retail no-contract pricing yet, presumably to minimize the potential of drawing customers that still wish to preserve their unlimited data plans on LTE devices such as this one, that emphasize multimedia consumption beyond the typical smartphone usage patterns.

The LG Intuition is LG’s attempt to capitalize on the success of the Samsung Galaxy Note while leveraging its own technologies, although it slightly improves on the home market and international versions by shipping with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, even though this particular LG device would be best served by the tablet oriented nature of Jelly Bean. Like the Note, the Intuition also features its own stylus, which LG calls “Rubberdium” owing to its rubberized tip, but is otherwise a standard capacitive stylus.

LG has also included NFC support in the Intuition and takes it a step further, with the  LG Tag+ app and two reprogrammable NFC  stickers that can be used to create and switch between different phone modes with a single tap.  The different modes are customizable and include Car Mode, Office Mode, Sleep Mode and User Mode.  Settings such as Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi and more can be turned on or off by tapping the back of the Intuition on an LG Tag+ sticker, though in practice very few would realistically use such methods for functions that could be easily accessed on the device itself.

Key Specifications:

• 5-inch display with high-definition detail
  • 4:3 aspect ratio to fully use the screen size and eliminate dead space
  • 650 NIT display provides excellent legibility and sharp details even in direct sunlight
• The Notebook app turns the Intuition into a virtual notepad for creating documents which, can include text, drawings, images, annotations, video and voice clips
• Business ready with enterprise grade security, corporate data encryption with Data-at-Rest Encryption (DARE), secure multi-headed VPN for corporate network connections, remote wipe capability and more
• Suite of Amazon apps includes Kindle, Shopping, MP3, Zappos, IMDB and Audible so customers can watch movie trailers, download audio books, shopping and more
• 8-megapixel camera with LED flash and 1080p HD video recording
• 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera for video chatting
• Enhanced camera features include voice commands to take a picture, continuous shot to take 6 shots with one tap and panorama shot to merge horizontal shots.
• Android^™ 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 1.5 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB RAM
• Mobile Hotspot – Share a 4G LTE connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices
• Bluetooth^® Version 3.0 + HS
• SmartShare – Share media wirelessly to DLNA-enabled devices

To sweeten the pot, so to speak, Verizon will also be offering an LG Tone Stereo Bluetooth headset at no additional cost from Thursday to Sunday when the Intuition is purchased online as an exclusive gift.