Inside the LG Arena

MANILA, Philippines - We’re right in the middle of a touch-screen interface boom. With Apple’s phenomenally successful iPhone setting the trend, every mobile phone manufacturer has scrambled to put their own versions of handsets with touch-screen interfaces to market.

LG is no exception. It’s no latecomer to the touch-screen race, though, having introduced the sub-P12,000 LG Cookie to the local market late last year.

Its latest multimedia touch-screen phone, the P24,900 Arena KM900, has already garnered over a million worldwide pre-orders online upon its announcement. It packs a lot of features in its 105-gram body, which comes in silver and black titanium.

A downside of having a touch-screen form factor is that many of these phones look alike. Again, the Arena is no exception. It resembles many other touch-screen handsets with only a handful of physical buttons: a volume rocker button and a dedicated camera button on the side, plus call and menu shortcut buttons underneath the display.

The design might not set new standards, but the interface and overall usability is anything but mediocre. In fact, using the Arena is a pleasurable experience. It sports an expansive three-inch 480 x 800-pixel capacitive touch screen and is equipped with an upgraded and more intuitive S-Class Touch user interface which looks great with its rich 3D graphics and gives decently quick response when navigating the menus.

The LG Arena features four rotating cube-based home screens that show media and contact shortcuts, as well as programs and widgets. The Arena also has an accelerometer that automatically switches the display from portrait to landscape, and supports multi-touch input. Zooming in and out can be done with a pinching motion using your thumb and forefinger, much like the iPhone.

Texting, on the other hand, is a different story, particularly if you’re used to conventional numeric keypads or QWERTY keypads. If you have large fingers, then you might be in for a bit of a challenge pressing the right keys. There is also a slight lag between tapping the letter and it appearing on the screen.

The LG Arena has an excellent five-megapixel camera equipped with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging, along with other customizable settings and even a 3D spatial viewing mode. Like many camera phones, there is a slight delay in working the shutter while photos taken on low-light settings have a bit of noise but otherwise look great.

The phone also features good editing software and is capable of shooting video at an impressive 720 x 480-pixel resolution at 30 frames per second. 

Other Arena features include Google Maps, document viewer, a dynamic organizer, a really nifty moviemaker with pre-installed transition effects, and a full-featured music player.

Connectivity options include GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA 7.2, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, Bluetooth, and USB. The Arena also has an internal memory of 8GB plus a microSD card slot for further expansion.

Battery life is average, lasting two days with moderate use of voice calls and messaging. Shutterbugs, video couch potatoes (it has Dolby and DivX technologies) and heavy Web browsers can expect the battery to drain even faster.

All things considered, the LD Arena is one full-featured multimedia touch-screen handset with impressively few compromises.