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LG Arena

LG Arena touchphone

Apple cool?

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Review As they say, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. The LG's KM900 - aka Arena - may pack in an impressive quantity of functionality, but the real question is whether LG’s new S-Class touchscreen UI, making its finger-dabbing debut on this device, has the touch.

LG Arena

LG's Arena: smooth and stylish

The Arena delivers plenty of contemporary multimedia features, including Assisted GPS, Wi-Fi, HSDPA 3G, a 5Mp camera and a media player with Dolby Mobile enhanced sound and an FM transmitter. There’s 8GB of on-board storage, plus MicroSD expansion support for up to 32GB of additional memory, and a rich, bright 3in, 480 x 800, 16m-colour display for showing off its multimedia capabilities.

Its classy build, with either silver or black titanium bodywork, certainly grabs the eye in that now-familiar minimalist iPhone-style slab-phone kind of way. Smooth, rounded and a shade under 12mm thick, the Arena has a reasonable 105.9 x 55.3 mm footprint and weighs a pocket-friendly 105g. It still feels robust in hand, with the metal framework complemented by scratch-resistant tempered glass protecting the display. Like many touchscreen models, it doesn’t show well in bright sunlight, but is otherwise one of the sharpest we’ve seen.

It has minimal touch sensitive buttonry on the front: Call and End plus a menu button that all disappear in to the black background when not in use. There's a discreet selection of buttons on the side - volume/zoom and camera - and a power/lock button on top. Next to this, LG has added a standard 3.5mm headphone socket.

For any touchscreen phone, usability is key. With all major mobile makers trying to lay a glove on Apple’s benchmark iPhone UI, S-Class is a step up from LG's recent touch models such as the Renoir, Prada II and Cookie.

LG Arena

There's a 5Mp camera on the back

It’s a busy set up, with its main menu paying more than a passing nod to the iPhone. It’s not completely all-new: one element we’ve seen before is the LG Arena’s multiple menu screens, which you can flip between with a swipe of the finger across the display. These offer four different versions of the home screen, one based around Contacts – showing selected favourites in a finger-swishable carousel or grid - another displaying your chosen app Shortcuts, a third for user-selectable on-screen Widgets, and an alternative Multimedia home screen, displaying twin rotating reels of music tracks and video content you can dab to play.

Latest Comments

@Langley

Why would you buy a Macintosh? It's simply a rip-off of a Xerox Alto gui interface. Why would you buy a Chevrolet or Volkswagen? It's a rip-off of a Karl Benz auto. I wish all the iTards out there would get their heads out of their arses and realize that Apple and every other manufacturer out there will copy and/or modify existing designs to advance whatever product they make better or at least different. Every design or concept Apple comes up with is submitted as a patent so no one 'steals' their precious ideas. And the stupid US Patent Office grants most of them. The Patent system is broken and does nothing but stifle innovation. If every designer and manufacturer in the world did this, we would all still be living in caves.

This 'Apple is the best' attitude is making me throw up.

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LG=Mac fanboi

What a blatant iPhone rip-off. Why would anyone buy a phone from a company that can only copy other companies' products?

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RE: LOL @ the Fanbois

See - that would be for the most part true, except usually it's the other way around, with the "regular person" spouting untruths about a phone they've never actually used, then the majority of "Apple Fanboi"'s holding their tongues or just ignoring them.... occasionally you get the occasional apple-tard who can't help themselves and spouts another pile of crap back the other way... and then it becomes entertainment! :)

Still... interesting observation... go back through the messages above and count the number of lines of "regulars" to "appletards", then scale them based on amount of crap dealt... I dare ya! ;)

Mines the one with the future ZunePhone clone in the pocket.

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LOL @ the Fanbois

<chuckle>

Fanybois make me smile.

Regular Person: "I don't want an iPhone because it can't ...."

Apple Fanboi: "SILENCE! THE iPHONE IS THE BEST! IF IT CAN'T DO SOMETHING THEN IT ISN'T WORTH DOING! YOU ARE A MORON IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING THAT THE iPHONE CAN'T DO! EVERY DEVICE EVER CREATED WITH A TOUCH SCREEN IS JUST COPYING THE iPHONE! ANY PHONE RELEASED FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF TIME WILL BE A CHEAP KNOCK-OFF! I WANT TO SUCK OFF STEVE JOBS AND SWALLOW HIS STICKY MESS!"

Seriously - that's how you come across.

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Hmm

Lots of things wrong here, on both sides of the argument. For example -

1. When you "buy" a subsidised phone, whether it's an iPhone or an Arena, it's yours. Legally and in every other sense it belongs to you, 100%. Of course you're committed to paying the x month minimum contract, but that's a separate matter, and not contingent on the phone.

2. The headphone jack on the iPhone 3G isn't recessed. Any 'phones will fit.

3. OS3.0 lifts Apple's SDK restriction on turn by turn directions. So there's now nothing to stop TomTom (or any other satnav co) from developing maps and software for the iPhone. Remember, OS3.0 is coming to the (GPS-equipped) iPhone 3G as well as any new hardware.

4. Yes, this is indeed yet another cheap iPhone clone that fails horribly. The UI is actually quite a poor impersonation, with too much eye-candy in place of the logical stuff that actually makes the iPhone nice to use. The browser is slooow and laggy, and of course once you scratch the surface you find this is no smartphone and no comparison to the iPhone at all, with no apps, little email smarts, and none of the expandability that makes the iPhone more than just a pretty face.

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