One of the best things about a big trade show like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that it gives us an opportunity to check out some of the devices released in other areas of the world, without having to go further afield.

LG has one of those, the LG Optimus Vu 2 (or, as it says on the marketing spiel, LG Optimus Vu: II - the colon is important, apparently), and it's certainly different.

Like the original Optimus Vu, the Vu 2 has a rather strange 4:3 squarish form factor. While it is an obvious rival to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, it doesn't look as much like a phone as the Note. In fact, it looks like a giant post-it note.

Strangely, considering its size, it has only a 5-inch display. It's also not quite HD, being 1024 x 768 (256ppi), but you wouldn't really notice. The Vu 2 is not meant for watching masses of media, we feel, but as a work device. Not that it's too slow, however - the 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, with 2GB of RAM is more than capable.

The 8-megapixel camera is also enough to be getting on with too, and there's a 1.3-megapixel one on the front for video calling. There's some cool proprietary software included, including Vu: Talk, the company's cunning application that allows you to draw on your screen while it appears in real time on another, over a data network or Wi-Fi.

Having had a play with Vu: Talk, we think you'll also be pleased with the phablet's 4G LTE capabilities, as the faster the speed of network the better. Over 4G it's almost instantaneous between devices, and we can see this sort of thing catching on big time.

There's one thing we don't quite get about the Vu 2, and that's its superthin antenna. Is this a Korean LTE thing? Or is it included to get the wax out of business types' ears? Either way, it's an odd sight on a modern device, and we suspect won't make it to other regions if the device ever gets out of LG's homeland.

UPDATE: We've just found out that the extendable aerial is exactly that. There's a digital TV tuner in the Korean version of the phone. It will almost certainly not make it to the UK, even if the Vu 2 does.