LG Arena Review - IPhone 3G Finally Has Some Competition. by Faraz Khan

The LG Arena may as well be the best phone released by LG phones yet. They have really made some serious improvements, one improvement worth mentioning is their brilliant S-Class display. The S-Class UI (User interface) designed specially for this phone promises such fluidity that has never been experienced in any of LG's previous cell phones. One may even say that LG Arena's S-class UI may as well be the only competitor to iphone in terms of their extremely smooth and super responsive UI. Another special feature of the S-Class is the 3D desktop cube effect. With this interface you get a cube that has been divided into 4 sections that you can turn around to view any one of the four sides. These are: contacts, widgets, shortcuts and a customizable home screen.

LG Arena has further impressed us with their memory capacity. The LG Arena has an internal memory of 8Gb and can support a microSD card upto 32GB. That makes a total of 40 GB. This even exceeds the capacity of the iphone.

LG Cell Phones have equipped this phone with a WVGA resolution screen (480 x 800 pixels) as compared to the previous WQVGA resolution screens. This is a major improvement and has to be seen to appreciate it. LG Arena comes with an accelerometer for a screen auto rotate. It also has the infamous pinch zoom capability.

Design:

Unlike other phones by LG (LG Viewty, LG Renoir), this touch screen marvel does not have any hardware keys. Even the call and call end keys are part of the touch screen. This seems awkward at first but one eventually gets used to it. Above these keys we have the huge display which as mentioned above is of WVGA; 480 x 800 resolution. Such a high resolution gives us more pixels per inch resulting in a more stunning display. Above the display we have the VGA camera for video calls along with the earpiece.

On the left side of the phone we have the USB port, the port is protected by a sliding lid, similar to the one found in viewty. While on the right side of the phone we have the volume rocker keys along with the camera shutter key.

On the top of the phone we have a 3.5mm audio jack, the power key and the back panel release button. The back side of the phone holds the 5 mega pixel camera. The camera has Schneider-Kreuznach optics and is supported by an LED flash. The LED flash here is a disappointment and the 5 MP camera should have been supported by a Xenon or a strobe flash. The LED flash is not a flash at all and is more of a flash light. Near the camera we have a second microphone that is used while recording videos.

Finally some of the more noticable features of the LG Arena are:

* 3" screen with a WVGA resolution. * Quad-Band Support. * 3G. * Wi-Fi and GPS. * 8GB internal memory. * 3D hardware accelerator. * DiVX and XViD support. * Mobile Dolby sound system.

While some of the more noticeable disadvantages of this phone are:

* Poor visibility in sunlight. * Cannot record in DiVX format. * Maximum email attachment size is 1 MB. * Has an LED flash whereas such a camera should have come with either a strobe or xenon flash.