The LG Arena is perhaps the most exciting handset to be released in the first quarter of 2009. It has incredible wealth of features like 5 MP Camera, DVD quality video recording, customizable menus in its new user friendly interface, 3G Video calling, WiFi, 3.5 mm headphone jack, A-GPS and it can do every other thing that you can expect a mobile phone to do, I mean, don’t expect it to make coffee for you or wash your clothes! Let’s take a look at our review to find if the features sum up to make it a decent compact touchscreen phone or just another feature crowded un-smartphone.
Interface
The new S-Class Interface features a homescreen that rotate onscreen like a virtual cube and shows media, contact shortcuts as well as programs and shortcuts. Every home screen has its own color theme that makes it colorful and very much alive. The rotating menu proves its usefulness to quickly navigate to your saved images and videos although it becomes somewhat laggy when the phone is filled with music and photos to render them. Also, the UI has good response to finger gestures. However, I did not like the home screen with 32 shortcuts to different phone functions. Some tools like Stop Watch or Message Settings could be easily hidden inside a submenu giving the homescreen a more free look.
Touchscreen
The 3 inch WVGA 480 X 800 screen is of very high quality showing finest of details. The resolution is far better than the iPhone’s 320 X 480 or even N97’s 640 X 360 display. The touchscreen is capacitive and gives good response like that of the iPhone. Though the size of 3 inch feels a bit short keeping its 480 X 800 resolution in mind. I expected it to be at least half an inch larger.
Music and Video
LG Arena is a real multimedia capable device. It can play every common version of music and videos and also MPEG -4 videos and DivX files that are encoded using version 5 or later. To pump out the best quality from your music files, it uses Dolby Mobile enhanced audio which sound very impressive. And yes! it has the 3.5 mm headphone jack which is hard to find on an LG handset. There is also a built in FM transmitter that allows it to wirelessly play FM.
Memory
The phone has 8GB inbuilt memory and an additional 32 GB microSD card can added to make it a total of 40 GB. This dwarfs the memory of even iPhone 3GS with its 32 GB memory. It seems that LG really wants its customers to use its full multimedia capabilities at its monster screens to watch full length HD movies in its screen.
Camera
The 5 MP Camera module uses Schneider-Kreuznach optics and is capable of shooting good pictures with its LED Flash and auto focus capabilities. The on screen shutter key impressed me as I don’t have to press and hold it like the normal shutter focus the object before taking the picture. The recorded videos are also high resolution DVD quality at 720 X 480 pixels at nice 30 frames per second speed.
Browsing
Arena supports 7.2 MBps 3G HSDPA connection and also WiFi networking capability. However the excellent hardware is not supported by good quality software. The browser seems to be very basic and is not tweaked for its high resolution screen.
Speed
The S Class Interface is made for speeding up the basic tasks of finding a contact from the phone book or choosing which song to play, but in practice it slows the things down. Scrolling the favorite contact list is slower than opening the address book, choosing a photo from the Rolodex is twice as long as choosing a photo from the grid list. Though it comes with a dedicated AMD graphics processor specifically engineered to handle the UI, still there seems some slowness in the Rolodex rendering. However it effectively handles the movement of the 3D cubes in its high resolution screen.
Stability
Somehow I got a feeling that the system was not stable at some stage of web browsing or music playing. It crashed 2-3 times while using those applications. However, I think that LG will resolve these stability issues very quickly.
Battery Life
Battery Life is stated to be 3.5 hours talktime and 300 hours of standby time which is on the lower side for a multimedia device like this. You should expect it to run hardly two days with not more than a hour of calling and few messaging and a few hours of music listening.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the LG Arena is a multimedia monster with its gigantic screen and support for a variety of media file types. But the web experience that is expected from this device does not satisfy us and the interface somehow feels sluggish. If are looking for a PMP that has mobile phone and simple web browsing capabilities, this is the one made for you.
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