Form Factor
The design is quite typical for a touchscreen handset. Unlike the iPhone its front is designed to be a full touchscreen with the Call Take and end keys and a shortcut option all being touch sensitive. This is quite like the HTC HD’s functionality; the difference is that these keys light up. The 3.0-inch touchscreen display sports a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and 16 million colors. It’s a light handset at just 105g with a slim form so naturally it becomes very easy to carry around.
On one side is an LG proprietary USB slot that’s universal for the charger and USB and on the other side are a set of Zoom/volume keys and a camera key below them. A 3.5mm handsfree socket is located at the top beside the power key that can also be used to lock the display, like in the iPhone. What I thought the handset could have used is a hot swap slot for the memory card, but with 8GB of internal space, that was hardly necessary. However, under the rear panel, a microSD card slot does exist, and you won’t have to remove the battery to remove it. The Arena also has a light sensor for the display that’s also like the iPhone's.
So it’s not an iPhone with a calm sophisticated look, it’s not an HTC HD with a large display, it’s not a funky Nokia 5800, nor a Pixon with its hefty camera, but the Arena, at least in the looks department, does have a unique blend of elegance, simplicity and a dash of femininity. Hopefully if it’s launched in another color I might see the latter part a little differently. But just so you know, it’s not a bad thing either way.
Features and Performance
I’m not going to go into detail about the actual performance of functionality of the handset’s features. Like I said, the model I received was a prototype tester, so any issues I faced I'm attributing to that factor.
Interface
The S-Class interface has a lot of good and bad points. The desktop is similar to the multiple desktops with widgets that the LG Cookie has. This version is a little more visually attractive and instead of two, you now have four separate desktops that cater to very specific needs. While I did like the smooth flow of the UI when flicking to switch desktops, I realized that I’d rather just have one with multiple widgets for various purposes, naturally the Samsung UI came to mind. Each desktop only offers a very specific set of features that you can use. You can customize the layout a bit but not too much. On the whole though, I found the desktops quite intuitive and colorful. Video will play in a small preview screen, but switch to landscape and it goes to full screen. The same goes for images. On the other hand music files can be played from the same Favorite’s (media) screen but you won’t be able to adjust any settings, which is rather odd.
The inside menu system is neatly categorized into four divisions – Communication, Multimedia, Utilities and Settings. Each category has more options than just the four per slot that you see initially. To access those you’ll have to flick to the side or simply use the accelerometer by changing the viewing orientation by shifting to landscape. The problem is the entire screen is then taken up completely with a bunch of colorful icons that have no headings so you’ll just have to wing it and go with the icon design.
The accelerometer is extremely smooth and thankfully not too eager to please. By that I mean it’s not going to switch orientation when the handset is tilted a bit. Of course I did wish that the entire interface would change orientation and not just particular screens so I wouldn’t have to keep switching from landscape to portrait and back again. I wasn’t too fond of the keypad layout. The alphanumeric keypad is large, but it took a lot of getting used to. Stubby fingers like mine kept hitting all the surrounding feature keys most of the time. The QWERTY keypad is large and was a lot easier to use. Once again, when it came to editing text, just like the iPhone, the Arena also has a small preview pop up to place the cursor. This was not as easy to use as the iPhone's and was not very receptive to placement.
MediaThe music player doesn’t have a full screen view. It plays directly from the list itself with a small
drop down system that has a visualization and a CD icon that has the album art. There are plenty of EQ presets to choose from including Dolby Mobile and Bobcat Mobile sound settings. They make a difference, for sure, but the problem was that I could have used a little bit more decibel level and a little less in the higher frequencies. Hopefully this will be fixed.
Videos looked gorgeous. The player has a Dolby Stereo setting in portrait mode but it vanishes in landscape for some reason. There didn’t seem to be any Resume Play option for files, which I had a major issue with. You can adjust the video size to suit the screen if your file resolution is lesser than the screen's display. The handset supports DivX playback so some files won’t need to be converted. LG has provided a DivX converter with the package to make things easier.
The radio refused to work so I can’t say much about that. It’d consistently gave me an error for the Auto-Scan option and refused to pick up any signals even if I manually located the stations. Hopefully I wont have an issue with the review piece. A voice recorder is also available as a stand alone application.
The handset’s multi touch capabilities really came through when it came to zooming in on images and web pages. It was quite smooth and responsive I have to say but I’ll admit the iPhone’s was just a little bit more so. Only a little though. Flick control for the images works well with the UI and the flow was fluid with no hiccups.
A couple of motion-based games are included. None of them are really entertaining as such, except for may be the Tepong, but that too gets a bit old after a while. My suggestion to LG would be to include a few more games like this to fill the space or at least include a few that are a little more entertaining.
Connectivity
The Arena is a well equipped handset when it comes to connectivity. It’s ready with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with an A2DP profile and of course EDGE/GPRS. It’s also 3G ready for when that technology becomes available. The Web browser seems a bit sluggish when it came to opening flash content on websites even via Wi-Fi. The layout of web pages looked good, but even on optimum settings for the display, text appears too small. You’ll have to Pinch to zoom in for a better view. Double tapping on the screen won’t do it for you.
It also offers Microsoft Exchange capabilities as well as easy setting up of POP and IMAP email addresses for email on the go. Google services like Google Maps, Search and access to Google Mail and You Tube as well as Blogger are also preloaded. The Google Maps works with the handset’s integrated GPS antenna, however, I couldn’t get it to work.
Misc. Features
All of the basics are available with this handset. The Arena also supports document viewing of DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF file formats. A dial system for making changes to the date etc. is designed to be similar to the iPhone, but when it comes to setting an alarm, it looks quite familiar to a clock with hands you can adjust accordingly. There’s also a well sorted calculator, World Clock, Unit converter and Memo pad.
Camera
A 5 megapixel autofocus camera with plenty of goodies is on board for those with the photo bug. From Geotagging, image stabilization, face tracking and manual focus, the Arena’s camera seems well equipped, but I did expect a few scene modes. There’s also an image editor and movie creator for slideshows as well. A pity it has just a single LED flash though. The Schneider-Kreuznach optics work brilliantly. Images appear clear and quite crisp. It did seem to take a little long to process pictures though, so a few pics came out a little blurry at times if there was a lot of movement, and I’m hoping this is not going to be an issue with a boxed piece.
Macro images looked good and the Arena allowed me to get pretty up close and personal to a lot of subjects.
The Bottom Line
The Arena is a ‘Cool’ handset. Perhaps my choice of words seems a little crass but I stand by that. It has a lot to offer. The very trendy S-Class UI is well designed but does have a few bugs when it comes to speed but not flow. The pricing of the device hasn’t been set yet nor can I confirm its India launch date. But to sum it all up, the UI could be tweaked a little to be fully optimized for touch control in a few places and a few features that didn’t work for me (like the keypad, radio and GPS) in the prototype I’m hoping fare better in the review piece. On the whole I like the S-Class UI and the LG Arena in general. It has a bit of a way to go before it can actually beat out the iPhone, but it’s pretty damn close.
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