Introduction
From now on LG is in the same class as Samsung and Nokia, they have joined the elite club. They are drinking fine wines together, while Sony Ericsson and Motorola can at most stare at them from the outside and look how the Finnish and the two Koreans light up a cigar. Apple is different, he can come in as well, he always wears a trendy dress, but he can’t communicate with the trio, as he doesn’t speak the Bluetooth language.
KM900 Arena is the latest hit from the smaller Korean company and it’s really fuc… well, I can’t really write that here, let’s just say it kicks ass. A lot. Just like many phone we’ve reviewed recently, this one has been announced in Barcelona as well, and of course we’ve been playing around with it over there already, but on that occasion it didn’t really turn out if this is good or not. We now that it is.
In the last couple of year LG grew a lot, and opposed to others it now seems that they won’t go and blow up. Besides the two Pradas and the Viewty they are now breaking sales records with KP500 Cookie, but the subject of our current review has hit the market only a couple of weeks ago in more lucky parts of the world, and it already has sales above two million.
It’s not a cheap handset, the customers will have to pay about 375 euros to get it, one could get an unlocked iPhone 3G for that, that’s sure. This is a touchscreen phone too, so everyone keeps comparing it to Apple’s phone; we won’t do that. This device has a closed operating system, it would rather be a rival of Samsung S8300, even though it has much better specs than iPhone. In turn, it’s not that flexible.
Box, exterior
It might be a shame, but I’ve only taken a close look at the packaging when I was looking for the manual. Of course this has its reasons, I’ll detail it later on, but there’s one more thing that’s a rare occurrence. As I’ve taken the phone and the battery out, I wasn’t interested in anything else, as LG Arena is astonishing at first sight (and at second too).
It’s not the design that shocked me, it’s one of a doze, there’s a large display, a minimal amount of buttons on the sides (for the volume and the camera), but the materials used are really high-quality ones. The metal back panel is white, and it’s really cool. It’s trendy, but high-quality, while the display is theoretically scratch-resistant, and there aren’t any more components, this is how everyone else should do it.
The first disappointment happens when we open the small slide on the left (which is a fantastic idea), as we get to see a proprietary LG connector, which isn’t compatible with anything else. On the other hand we get a standard 3.5 mm jack on top of the phone. We might become even happier when we observe that the headset that comes with the phone is an in-ear type, and seems to be a high quality one. The package also includes a data cable, a mini CD and a thick manual.
The dominant part of the front is a 3” capacitive display, which has a resolution of – take a deep breath – 480 x 600 pixels, which is a rare thing on phones, we could have only seen it on Sony Ericsson X1 and HTC Touch HD. There are of course 16 million colors, the technology is TFT, readability is not perfect in bright sunlight, although LG’s designers used bright colored icons on the black wallpaper. Above the display we can see the secondary camera and the speaker, while on the display’s frame, on the left of the LG logo, there is a distance meter, which detects how close our head is, so we won’t tap the display with our facial hair during a call.
The white color of the back might be misguiding, as this is made of metal as well. There are some small labels telling us that this is a professional phone, besides the 5 megapixel text we can observe a Dolby Mobile logo. Around the camera we can see the Schneider-Kreuznach label, also seen on some other LG models, which makes us remember some really pleasant, high-quality pictures. The memory card can be accessed by taking the back panel off, but fortunately the battery doesn’t have to be taken out.
S-Class menu
LG Arena is the first phone to have the manufacturer’s own, completely redesigned menu system called S-Class UI. No, this is not an operating system, but a graphical interface and in the future it will appear on other models, so we’ll take a close look at it right now, as it’s really nice and complex.
Let’s start with a scenario when the “keypad” lock (which is rather a screen lock) is active. In this case, by pressing the power button on the top the display comes alive, and by long-pressing the unlock button on the bottom, it rotates and pops up one of the four dedicated screens. By the way we always get back to the same place where we’ve locked the screen, so if we’ve put the phone down when reading messages, we’ll get back right there.
The menu system has two views, we first have the four dedicated screens I’ve mentioned, which are in fact the sides of a cube and we can switch between them by stroking the screen from left to right or from right to left. This is already cool, but we can spice it up even more by tapping the middle on-screen button, when the menu really becomes a cube that can be rotated and by tapping on a side we can select it and it will be displayed on fullscreen again.
The four screens have different things. We can place a total of nine icons (shortcuts) on the one with a bluish background, and practically we can put anything here. The one with the brown background is reserved for widgets, this can be scrolled vertically as well, and we can pull widgets on it from the bottom row. The green screen is for our favorite contacts, while the purple page displays selected multimedia contents. The contact list, messaging, the dialer and the menu’s icon is displayed on the bottom row of all four screens.
This cube with the rotation and everything is very fast. We can edit the screens by long-pressing a selected element and then the interface becomes editable. This was the thing I didn’t discover by myself and I needed the manual. We cannot only organize contents of the multimedia and the contact list panel like on the iPhone, but all the stuff is placed on a cool spindle, and we can spin it with a finger. It’s a cool, well though-out system, but this is not all, as I didn’t mention the main menu yet.
The main menu is completely new. 16 icons are displayed at a time, arranged in four rows. But – and this can be seen through a small shake-like animation as soon as we enter the menu – we can pull the rows with our finger, so we can see four additional icons per row. It’s a really thoughtful thing, I’ve been absolutely astonished. And that’s not the end: the phone’s gyroscope makes it possible that by rotating the phone, all icons are displayed on-screen (even though in a smaller size); this looks awesome.
Basic functions
Until now LG Arena is a really cool device, but nothing’s perfect. As soon as we want to get to different features from the main menu, we can notice some slowdown. There’s a solution for this too, as the phone supports multitasking, we can have up to nine applications running in the background. We can switch between these with the square-shaped touchkey between the call handling buttons, and using this method we get a lightning fast speed.
The phonebook can store 1000 contacts. Here the interface is black and orange colored on a white background. Unfortunately rotation won’t work here, so we get a portrait list. Scrolling is basically great, but that’s no use if we have tons of contacts, we need to search. There’s a quicksearch on the top, first I thought it filters the list only if we click on the arrow after typing the letters, but that’s not correct. The thing is that the filter is so slow that we won’t notice it working. The other option is to use the search function from the options menu, which works faster, but we don’t know why. The pop-up text entry window displays a virtual phone keypad, which is okay, but filtering is really slow. Each contact can have quite a large amount of extra details attached, a photo and a ringtone as well, so this is okay. We can select our “favorite” contacts, these will be displayed on one of the four panels I’ve described before.
Messaging is usually the most difficult thing to be made good on touchscreen phones. LG Arena is exceptionally great in this matter, as the gyroscope works when entering text, so the display is rotated and we get a QWERTY keyboard. When held vertically, we have to use a standard phone keypad, so if both of our hands are free, we should use the landscape view and the full QWERTY keyboard.
It might be due to the capacitive display, but I think it’s also because of the fine resolution that the chance of mistyping is practically minimal, I’ve never in my life have seen such a good virtual keyboard, although I’ve though after BlackBerry Storm that there will be nothing more to be seen in this industry. This keyboard, however, is world champion, and the default layout has special characters, so this gets such a huge bonus point that won’t fit on the 3” screen. Another bonus goes for the copy-paste feature, which is very easy to use.
As for the features, the messaging menu has an SMS and MMS editor, it displays these in a chronological order, we can read them only in a vertical view, the screen can be rotated only during editing. As a bonus we have a chat-like view for those like it (me, for example). The email client is in a separate menu item and I’ve been surprised on first launch that Arena can communicate with Exchange servers. Furthermore it’s so intelligent that it detects what operator’s SIM card is in use and automatically configures the email address provided by the network. Besides these we can set up additional email accounts and there is a wizard to help the user in the process. This tries to guess what kind of POP3 and SMTP servers can be used. Attachments are of course supported.
Office and games
If a phone has such a shiny and spectacular menu, office features are often minimal. Well, this is not true in the case of LG Arena. The calendar has a beautiful month view, it has a great interface using nice fonts. The week view is even better and there is a daily breakdown as well, wonderful. Four kinds of entries can be stored and there is a separate option for holidays, so this means a total of five, and we can have a total of 500 entries. Events can of course be set to repeat.
The alarm clock is completely new. We can access the countdown timer from the same place, while the alarm clock has two parts, there is a “widget alarm”, which can be configured from the brown panel, and there is the standard alarm, which has every possible configuration option. This includes the ringtone, vibration rhythm and power, displayed text, repeat times and snooze time. In order to set it up, we have to turn the arms of a clock, this has a sunny sky displayed between 6 AM and 6 PM, while outside this interval we can see a starry sky. Of course one could do without such tricks, but the S-Class menu is full of such delicacies and you can see new ideas in every menu, and these don’t affect functionality at all. It’s astonishing, there’s no other word for this.
The calculator has large buttons and supports trigonometric functions. The stopwatch has lap timing, notes do exactly what they have to, while the world clock has a list view, but as we add a new city, we’ll have a nicely designed, rotatable globe. At the sound recorder we can choose between MMS-sized recording or we can record until the memory fills up, in my case this meant 549 hours. Well, yeah, it’s easy to do that, there’s 8 GB of on-board memory… The recorder can be accessed during calls and it stores the voice of both parties.
We’re still not done, as LG Arena can display all kinds of Office documents with Picsel Viewer. This is a cool feature on such a high resolution display and the gyroscope works over here too, but what’s even more is that this is the first place where we can make use of the multitouch feature. We can zoom in and out of documents just like iPhone handles pictures. Even though the animation is not that smooth, it still works fine.
As for games, we have multiple options. First we have the good old Java, and LG Arena also supports Flash Lite applications. Pure Flash content is too much for the phone, but small things run without a problem. Additionally we have the M-Toy menu, which includes three applications that use the gyroscope, none of them are a big deal. Besides the usual dices and the wheel of fortune (as seen on KM500) we also have a ping pong game.
Camera
I have to deal with the multimedia features separately, as there are so many important things to write about the camera and the music player, that I could fill more than two pages. We get a 5 megapixel Schneider-Kreuznach lens for taking pictures, and there is also a LED flash to provide some additional light, and of course there’s autofocus as well, which has two settings: infinite and macro mode.
We should hold the phone horizontally, the most important settings (focus, flash, white balance) are accessible on the right, but if we tap the cogwheel, we get a cool, rotating submenu where we can set image size, quality, focusing method, the image stabilizer, image sequencing and the self timer. There is geotagging support, while ISO value can be set between 100 and 800, and the software supports face recognition as well.
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Exposure is not very fast, we should hold the phone still after the sound effect, or the image might get blurry. These two things should really have been synchronized. The images (above) are very mixed. Some of them are really good, but noise filtering is sometimes too powerful, and it’s completely useless on other pictures, as there is still very much noise left on the picture. On one of the images we can see chromatic aberration as well, but this time it’s not purple like on some Sony Ericsson models, but bright green. In many cases the image stabilizer didn’t help, and the picture got blurry, this is mostly due to the delayed exposure. We can take relatively good pictures, but we have to pay a lot of attention, and this makes the point of mobile phone photography loose its meaning a bit.
The device is strong in video recording, we can record movies at 720 x 480 pixels, and there are such settings like making the phone pay attention to sounds coming from the front or the back. Of course video clips recorded at 30 fps take up a lot of memory, here’s 36 second recording, where a beautiful lady greets our readers, straight from Hungary (I just wrote this so that you click on it) and it takes up over 9 megabytes.
We won’t be disappointed by reviewing. Movies are played back without any lags and at the pictures we can again use the multitouch, which is again very practical. The gallery loads thumbnails quickly and if we tilt the phone, the photos slide in very spectacularly, and it’s not even annoying. There is a slideshow mode as well, although I don’t like that very much. We can transform the videos with the built-in muvee application. Oh, by the way, the phone has no problem playing back DivX, XviD and MPEG4 format videos. We can really make something out of this image quality and the 3” display size.
Music
Although we had some minor problems with the camera, we’ll be surely satisfied with the musical part. After launching the player, it looks around the internal memory and the memory card, checking for files it supports and provides us a list, sorted alphabetically by track titles. We don’t have to stick with this, as we can sort the tracks by artist, album and genre as well. We scroll to the track we want and playback starts as soon as we press the little arrow. Here we can see some additional eye-candy, as the currently played back track’s row gets larger, the album cover is displayed and there is a nice little visualization running in the background, which can be changed.
If we rotate the phone, the player gets reorganized: the album cover is placed on the right, the visualization gets larger, while the track list stays on the left. Of course the player can run in the background, and the best part is yet to follow: there is an FM transmitter, which can be used for broadcasting music to a radio. It has a range of about 5-6 meters, which should be enough for using it inside a car, although quality is not stable, sometimes we can hear some hissing.
Sound quality is not bad on the handsfree either, as the metal case improves things big time, but it’s time to get the headset out of the box, which will change everything. This has no call accept button, it cannot be taken apart, but it’s an in-ear headset. Volume and sound quality are great, and this is when we select Dolby from the equalizer, and we’ll have a really shocking experience. Suddenly we can separate the instruments used, and the already good performance gets much, much better, our jawbone will match the rhythm of the bass and I personally found myself sitting with the headset at 2 AM, listening to my favorite tracks on a mobile phone.
There is an FM radio as well, with automatic station tuning, RDS and a cool user interface, where we can scroll the tune wheel with our finger. We will need the headset to be plugged in, there’s no Dolby support here, but of course the quality is still okay. I found LG Arena exceptionally good in terms of music, even more if I compare it to an average mobile phone.
Data transfer, battery
LG Arena performs well in data transfer too. It supports all possible European network standards from GPRS to 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA. If this wouldn’t be enough, we can use WLAN as well, which has a medium sensitivity and supports WPA2 encryption. Of course this requires a browser as well, since the resolution will be enough to have a great experience.
The browser works in landscape as well, but it’s not perfect. The multitouch display comes in handy again, as we can zoom pages, which works okay, but a more complex website makes things slow down, and there’s no option like on Apple phones and Opera Mobile which makes a part of the webpage grow on a double-tap. Of course it still works, we can even watch YouTube videos without a problem, but there would have been room for some improvement.
Locally we have stereo Bluetooth 2.0 and there’s a USB cable in the box, which can charge the handset from the PC. It won’t do anything else before we install the provided software, which includes a modem driver as well. Still, we can use the handset in USB Mass Storage mode without installing the software. Software updates can be done via the same application, there is a separate note about this in the manual, although I can’t guess if there will be a new software available.
Besides these we shouldn’t forget that the phone has a GPS receiver too, which locates our position very quickly, thanks to the AGPS technology, which uses cell information too. The phone has Google Maps installed, which requires internet connection it doesn’t support turn by turn navigation, and since Arena has a closed operating system, we can’t install iGO, Garmin, Sygic or any other software.
I think the battery is not enough for this amount of features. The high resolution screen consumes a lot of energy, and you just have to play around with the phone, so it won’t stay online for more than two days. We should forget about USB charging, it takes a lot of time, a wall plug is the ideal solution, as this way the battery is charged in two hours.
Summary. Should I write one? LG Arena is this year’s best phone until now, there’s no doubt about that. It’s not a cheap one, as it costs about 375 euros, but this includes everything that one could expect from a phone that has no open operating system. As a bonus we get a bleeding edge display and high quality materials, the best part being the S-Class menu system, which has more ideas and innovation than any other mobile communication device that has been launched since iPhone. It’s much, much better than the possible greatest rival, Samsung S8300.
LG grew up. They have learned so much about making phones in a couple of years, like Samsung did, starting a bit earlier. I don’t know who is in head of the KM900 Arena project at LG, but he should receive at least a worker of the year award. The phone surely gets one from us:
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| LG KM900 Arena |
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Specifications
| LG KM900 Arena | ||
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General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS, HSDPA | |
| Size | 105.9 x 55.3 x 12 mm | |
| Weight | 105 grams | |
| Colors | Silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display size | 3” diagonal | |
| Display resolution | 480 x 800 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT, capacitive | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 8 GB | |
| Memory expandability | microSDHC (max 16GB) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | yes / yes | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | yes / yes - 7,2 Mbit/s | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | no / 2.0 A2DP | |
| WiFi | yes | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | no / yes | |
| GPS receiver | yes | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | no / no | |
| Sound recorder | yes | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | yes | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | S-Class | |
| WAP / HTML browser | yes / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes | |
| Java | yes | |
| Games | 3 | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | Picsel Viewer, Google Maps | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus, flash | |
| Secondary camera | yes | |
| Video recording | 720x480 pixels | |
| Music player | yes, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | yes | |
| FM radio | yes, RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 1000 mAh-s Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 300 hours | |
| Talk time | 230 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| touchscreen display, widgets, gyroscope, Dolby, multitouch, 3.5 mm jack, metal case, FM-transmitter, DivX support | ||
