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LG Arena (KM900) review

When is an iPhone not an iPhone? When it’s the LG Arena!

The LG Arena is the nearest yet to something worthy of competing with the iPhone, but only because LG has tried so hard to copy it. A little too hard, some might say. It’s amazing, to the point where you’ll probably laugh to see how similar the two models are side by side, although the LG is a lot smaller. In fact, it’s a very well built device (although removing the metal battery cover was a bit of a mission) that will especially appeal to anyone that thinks the iPhone is just a little too big.

Despite its smaller shell, the Arena has the higher resolution screen, a 5-megapixel camera with flash, near HD video recording and a memory card slot so you can add more memory with ease (it comes with 8GB of its own, which should keep you going for a while).
It even has a capacitive touchscreen and multitouch control, allowing you to pinch and pull on the screen to zoom in or out. Funnily enough, rather like on an iPhone.

Class obsession

LG’s new S-Class user interface has been created by people with an unhealthy obsession with the iPhone. There are a few subtle changes, presumably to keep the lawyers at bay, but the icon layout, colours and fonts are all heavily influenced by Apple’s creation. Now, this is a risky strategy. Someone who gets into the Apple mindset will probably buy an iPhone regardless of what anyone else is offering.

For everyone else, you have to start looking at how good a product it is in its own right. Fortunately, the Arena doesn’t disappoint. It’s extremely quick to respond to your touch, and once you’ve stopped wondering how LG thinks it can get away with ripping off Apple, you can begin to look upon it as a highly capable touchscreen phone that is a world apart from similar looking Windows Mobile powered models from HTC.

Although the main menu looks like an iPhone, each row of icons (four in total) can be scrolled left and right to reveal four more icons per row. Turn the phone sideways and all 32 icons become available at once. It’s only the high-resolution, 480×800 pixel screen that makes this possible without everything turning into a blurry mess – although it does look rather over the top. LG has obviously never heard of the phrase ‘less is more’.

The top row is for communication, the second multimedia, followed by utilities and settings. LG has gone one step further too, with a homescreen divided into four sides of a cube (which can easily be rotated with your finger). Here you can place shortcuts, allowing you quick access to tasks like writing a message, widgets, your contacts and easy viewing of multimedia content. You can customise each of these screens, with the most control given to the widgets screen.

There is a large selection of widgets to choose from, including the usual array of clocks, status bars, calendars and weather forecast tools. Of course, these aren’t in the same league as the range of applications downloaded from the Apple App Store.

The Arena can run Java applications though, and like Samsung’s Tocco Ultra Edition, they run with the base of the screen reserved for virtual softkeys and directional navigation buttons. There’s no slide-out keyboard, so all text entry is done from an on-screen keyboard or keypad. Because of the excellent responsiveness, entering text is incredibly easy. You can choose between multitap and T9, or use a full QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode. You’ll even find a cut and paste facility here, so need to wait for an OS update later in the year!

Locking the phone is easy, with a quick press of the power button or allowing the autolock function to kick in after a chosen time. Unlocking is not performed by sliding a bar, but pressing a box inviting you to ‘press & hold to unlock’. It does mean a short wait, especially because of the animated transition that takes you back to wherever you were, but it looks nice and adds to the slick nature of the user interface.

The short transition before the lock kicks in also means you can give a quick tap to cancel the locking process when you see the screen start to move.

Flash photography

The camera is an area where the Arena beats the iPhone, although that’s hardly difficult. With a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and LED flash, it’s way out in front. It also has a front-facing camera in case you might ever want to make a video call. While there are plenty of 8-megapixel cameraphones on the market now, including LG’s Renoir, the picture quality here still proved to be excellent, as long as the lighting conditions were good.

Outdoor shots were extremely sharp, with vivid colours and excellent exposure – surprisingly good in fact. However, shots taken indoors weren’t anything like as pleasing. Despite it not being particularly dark, the level of noise was too high to produce a top quality image. Integrated GPS means photographs can be geo-tagged, and there’s also face tracking, but no smile detection. 30 frames per second video recording at up to 720×480 pixels is also very respectable.

Media king

The Arena is ideally suited for multimedia, thanks to the combination of a large screen and support for DivX video, so you can play back high quality video from other sources without needing stacks of storage space. It’s not all plain sailing though, because the video player won’t remember where you were if you exit and come back to the player later. Nor does it support bookmarks to manually set a point to play back from.

This is a real issue because there’s one aspect of the Arena that is going to cause major frustration. The call and end keys are touch sensitive, meaning an accidental touch means you will all too easily quit whatever you’re doing. It’s especially likely to happen when you’re holding the phone sideways, as you will when watching video.

There’s another issue too. Although the camera is excellent in daylight, the screen isn’t. It’s incredibly hard to see outdoors so you’ll have to either shield the screen, while keeping well clear of the end key, or just cross your fingers and hope that you’re aiming the camera the right way.

Another way to watch video is using the supplied docking station. It allows for easy charging and PC connectivity, for transferring media, as well as connecting the phone to a TV via a composite lead. It’s a shame LG hasn’t adopted the standardised microUSB data connector though, meaning you get a proprietary USB lead instead, but it is incredibly easy to drop the phone into the dock without having to carefully line it up. This makes it easy to keep the battery topped up at home or in the office, which is good because the 1000mAh battery will be under a lot of pressure should you use it heavily for games, music and video. Not that the iPhone is exactly good in the battery performance area, so it’s all relative.

Good surroundings

The internal speaker isn’t much cop, but LG has teamed up with Dolby to include Dolby Mobile virtual surround, which seriously enhances the audio experience when using headphones, either via the 3.5mm headphone socket or wirelessly using Bluetooth.

The Arena also has an integrated FM transmitter, so you can play music in the car without the need for Bluetooth – although the sound quality isn’t as good and local interference can spoil things.

Wi-Fi support sets the Arena apart from the Tocco Ultra Edition, although you must choose a specific access method for email, which limits its usefulness if you want to use Wi-Fi whenever available and switch to 3G automatically on the move.

The web browser isn’t quite up there with Safari either, but it is better than the Samsung browser primarily because of the improved resolution. You can also install Opera Mini if you want a decent alternative.

If I have to be honest, I don’t see the LG Arena as an alternative to the iPhone. The benefits of the iPhone go way beyond the look and feel, such as the App Store and seamless integration with a PC or Mac using iTunes. Managing media on the Arena isn’t as slick, and Java applications can never quite compete, but the Arena is an excellent phone that will appeal to those who didn’t actually want an iPhone in the first place.

VERDICT

Editor’s ChoiceNo, you’re not looking at a picture of the new iPhone. This is the LG Arena; a phone that looks incredibly similar, even though it does do things slightly differently. The smaller phone has a higher resolution display, 5-megapixel camera, video recording, MMS and cut & paste (no need to wait for iPhone OS 3.0 here).

It also offers web, email, GPS and expandable memory on top of the 8GB built-in. It doesn’t have a fancy application store (instead, you must use Java applications or widgets) but the user interface is slick and it makes a alternative for people that merely see an iPhone as style over substance.

RATINGS (OUT OF 5)

PERFORMANCE: 4
FEATURES: 5
USABILITY: 3
OVERALL: 4

Compare the LG Arena against 100 other current and latest mobile phones at:

www.best4mobiles.co.uk

About the Author

Compare the LG Arena against other phones at:www.best4mobiles.co.uk Mobile Phone Comparison Shop – Compare Mobile Phones

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