Review: LG Arena

LG’s Arena looks like so many other phones we’ve seen of late. It’s an all-screen touchphone, with nothing notable in the looks department. Its titanium backplate is interesting, though, and helps keep the weight down to 105g.

Overall this is a comfortable smartphone to handle at 105.9mm tall, 55.3mm wide and 11.95mm thick. But you have to look a little deeper than the nicely constructed chassis for the outstanding features of this smartphone. And for the really annoying features too.

Specs & info
Price: contract
Operating system: proprietary
Processor: n/a
Memory: 8GB
Dimensions: 105.9mm x 55.3mm x 11.95mm
Weight: 105g
Display size: 3 diagonal inches
Display resolution: 800 x 480 pixels
Expansion slot: 1 x miniSD

The screen is absolutely superb. It measures three inches diagonally and its 480 x 800 pixels are sharp and bright. It is, of course, a touch screen, and inevitably it attracts fingermarks.

You sweep and swipe to get between four main screens. One houses user-configured shortcuts to nine apps, one gives access to your photos and music, one is for your contacts and the fourth is a widgets screen you can cover with an array of shortcuts to various tools from a music playback controller to a calculator.

The photos, music and your contacts can be presented in a vertically scrolling carousel which you sweep through to find what you want. This, like the rest of the Arena’s touch-screen capability, is very responsive and it works well if the numbers are small. If you’ve more than a hundred contacts, for example, the finger scrolling might get tedious.

No complaints there, nor with the menu that opens up when you tap the status bar line. This gives access to various connectivity options and to profiles. In general the design of applications is appealing and intuitive. The FM radio, for example, has a tuner icon that looks like a tuner button on a real radio and you simply run a finger along it to find stations.

It is the 3D ‘cube’ that irritates more than anything else. Accessed by tapping a touch-button beneath the screen which lies between the Call and End buttons, this is a sort of dice that sits in the centre of the screen and which you roll with a finger sweep. Four sides are populated with icons that represent the four main screens. Tap one and it animates up and opens full screen, transforming into one of the four home screens. It looks very pretty, but it is totally unnecessary.

There is mobile email of course, and here we hit another problem. An accelerometer switches between a T9-style keyboard and full Qwerty as you turn the handset with the latter, in wide mode, making it better for writing longer texts. Unfortunately it is too cramped for fast text entry.

If you can forgive the cube and text entry failings there is a lot to smile about. A five megapixel main camera and front camera for two-way video calls, Wi-Fi and HSDPA to 7.2Mbps are among the goodies on offer. There is finger panning and a pinch-to-zoom feature on the web browser giving iPhone-like control of pages, and in general we found the browser was positive, though we did do a lot of zooming in from the initial full-screen rendering of pages visited which can be time-consuming.

The Arena has TV-out capability, though you don’t get a cable with the phone. A GPS antenna is built in and Dolby Mobile helps with sound quality. We like that there is a 3.5mm headset connector on the top edge, and video playback is very good. There is 8GB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot for adding more.

The final analysis has to be that LG’s Arena shows us what is possible, then slaps us with some poorly implemented features. The Qwerty touch keyboard, silly cube and failure to bundle a TV-out cable are three examples.

Essential Verdict
Performance: 8/10
Very responsive to finger taps and a super screen

Design: 8/10
Lightweight and small, top mounted 3.5mm headset connector

Features: 6/10
All the right features, plus the 3D ‘cube’ which is unnecessary and annoying

Value for Money: 7/10
Looks to be fair value on contract

Overall score: 7/10

Review originally published in Smartphone & PDA Essentials magazine. Words by Sandra Vogel.

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