The LG KM900 Arena is one powerhouse of a handset, managing to incorporate almost everything that you can imagine in a mobile phone. A large capacitive touchscreen, 5 Megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, 8 GB built-in memory DivX/XviD playback, accelerometer, you name it, the Arena has got it. On top of that is LG’s new touch interface, which they call the S-Class interface, and you have in your hands a complete all-round device. Well that’s on paper at least. We got our hands on a proper retail unit of the Arena, well before its official release date sometime next month, and can now see whether it keeps its promise in real life as well.
Bundle
- LG KM900 Arena
- Battery
- Charger
- In-Ear Headset
- USB Data Cable
Design & Construction
"No, it’s not the iPhone!" That’s something I had to keep telling people while testing the Arena. And I don’t blame them either. It’s not as if the Arena is a complete rip-off of the iPhone’s design but the similarities are striking.
The front side is dominated by the large display. Above the display you can see the phone’s sole loudspeaker and beside it is the video calling camera. On the left side of the LG logo is the proximity sensor that switches off the display when you bring it close to your face during a call so you don’t accidentally trigger something on-screen. Besides it is the ambient light sensor for adjusting the display brightness.
Below the display are the three touch sensitive keys. One is the Call key, one is the End key and the one in the middle is the multitasking key. You press the multi-tasking key and then you can choose between the four different desktop screens. Press and hold it and you get a list of running apps from where you can switch or end them. Below it is the microphone. The border around the display is covered in glossy chrome and beautiful
brushed metal finish.
the LG logo is another microphone for video recording.
The rear side has a matte grey finish. The camera is located at the top left corner. The lens is totally exposed which makes it easy target for fingerprints, dust and scratches. Beside it is a tiny LED flash. At the bottom near
The build quality of the phone was absolutely top notch. The phone felt rock solid in hand and not a hint of creak or groan from the body. The front surface being glossy was a major fingerprint magnet but that is something common to all touchscreen phones.
Overall the design and build quality of the phone is very impressive and the phone is definitely worthy of the price it retails at.
Display
The LG KM900 Arena has a 3.0" 16 M colour, 480 x 800 pixel WVGA capacitive touchscreen display. Compared to the size of the display, the resolution is enormous which gives it incredible pixel density. The display looks amazing indoors with bright sharp colours and superb brightness. The icons, wallpapers, videos and everything else looks brilliant on it. However take the phone outdoors under sunlight and you’ll find hard too see what is there on the screen.
Similar to the LG phones we have reviewed in the past, the Arena display has poor sunlight legibility. What’s worse is that the glossy display and the chrome reflect sunlight. This affects some aspects of the phone such as outdoor photography and GPS navigation.
The touch sensitivity of the display is excellent. Even the lightest of touch is registered and multi-touch gestures work fine as well.
UI & Applications
The Arena uses, what LG calls, the S-Class UI. It has been optimised for full finger based navigation and seems to be heavily inspired by the iPhone UI.
The Arena has four home screens, each with a different functionality. The first one allows you to have up to nine of your favourite apps as shortcut on the screen for quick access. The second one offers several widgets such as a calculator, weather, notes, etc. on the desktop screen. The third one allows you to put your favourite contacts on-screen for quickly calling or messaging them. The fourth one allows you to put 20 of your favourite music tracks and images on-screen.
You can have any one of these screens set as the default one. To access the others just slide your fingers on the screen horizontally and the screen flips to the next one. Or you can press and the multitasking key and get a 3D cube on the screen with each desktop screen as one side of the cube and you can just turn it around and select the one you want. However on the bottom of any screen four icons remain constant regardless of the desktop you choose. They are the shortcuts to the on-screen number dialler, contacts app, messaging and the main menu.
The main menu has a very interesting design. According to their functionality they have been sorted into four rows; communication, multimedia, utilities and settings. Each has eight icons of which four are displayed on-screen and to access the others you need to scroll horizontally within the same row. If you flip the phone horizontally you can see all the 32 icons on-screen at once without needing to side scroll. The scrolling is accompanied by nice sliding animations.
The sub menus are all in the form of lists. You just slide the phone across and the lists start scrolling. The Arena has kinetic scrolling so the lists first start scrolling briskly but then slows down and eventually stops scrolling, just like in the iPhone. If the particular menu has additional options such as settings, etc. then they can be accessed by pressing the square at the top left corner of the screen. On the other side is the exit key to go back one level or close the app. Each press on the screen can be accompanied by a haptic feed back or a sound if one wishes to.
Some applications such as the browser, music player, etc support multi-tasking, i.e. you can minimise them and open another application. The currently open applications can be accessed by pressing and holding the multi-tasking key.
I have a couple of grouses with the UI though. First is the obvious resemblance to the iPhone UI. It seems there is some kind of competition going on among cell phone manufacturers as to who can imitate the iPhone’s UI the best. Almost everything in the Arena looks like the iPhone OS, from the scrolling lists, the buttons, on-screen QWERTY keypad, even the vertical dials for the clock settings seem to be lifted.
I wouldn’t have even complained if the S-Class would have worked just as good as the iPhone OS, but it doesn’t. Things like scrolling through lists, don’t feel as natural as in the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, the Arena’s display is sometimes unable to recognize whether the user wants to scroll or just select an item on the screen. You often end up selecting something when you just wanted to scroll.
Then there are glitches such as the occasional freezing and crashing. It would have been understandable had the phone been a pre-production sample but as we confirmed that wasn’t the case and the Arena that we had is basically what you’ll get in stores soon. Many a times the phone would stop responding to inputs and just freeze for several seconds. This would happen more often in the music player. Imagine getting stuck at high volume while listening to music on earphones and then trying to quickly reduce the volume only to realize that the phone has frozen and does not accept your inputs. Well, it happened more than once with me.
The accelerometer behaviour was also a bit erratic. It would sometimes unnecessarily turn the UI around even at the slightest tilt of the phone on the side but sometimes won’t when you really want it to.
The only good thing I can say about the UI is that it is fairly easy to use and feels quick with no lags or slowdowns. I would have also complimented the UI design had it been original, but then it isn’t.
A lesson to be learnt here is that unlike what most people think the iPhone’s UI is not just stylish but there is actually some functionality there and you actually feel some deep thought has gone into designing it to make it really user friendly and not just good looking. You cannot just copy the basic design and expect it to work just as well. The more quickly other touchscreen phone makers grasp this fact the better, as till then the iPhone’s UI will continue to remain the best that there is.
Communication, Calling & Messaging
The LG KM900 Arena has almost every form of connectivity that can be imagined. First of all it is a GSM Quad band handset supporting GSM 850/900/1800/ 1900 bands. It is also 3G HSDPA enabled. Then there is GPRS and EDGE Class 10, A-GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth v2.0 (with A2DP) and USB 2.0.
The call quality and network reception on the Arena was excellent with no complaints whatsoever. The loudspeaker was also loud enough with decent vibration strength for your incoming calls to be heard and felt clearly.
The GPS and Wi-Fi worked well. The Bluetooth however felt much slower while transferring data with some phones, even though they were v2.0 compliant. Also when paired with two of our Bluetooth stereo headsets, the phone preferred to connect in the Bluetooth Mono Stereo mode instead of just Stereo where in the music tracks first started playing mono and then went stereo after a while and there was no way to fix this. Also LG promises High Speed transfer speeds on the USB but I just got average speeds while testing.
The messaging app supports SMS and MMS. Emails have their own application. The editor is common for both. You can start writing a message and then add whatever content as you please. From the top bar you can choose to go to the inbox, drafts, sent messages, etc.
Now the problem is with the on-screen keypad. There are two keypads, a standard one that is available when the phone is in portrait mode and a full QWERTY when the phone is in landscape mode. The standard keypad has large enough buttons and you can use it without many typos. However, for the life of me, I couldn’t operate the QWERTY keypad without pressing the wrong keys, nor could anyone else who tried it.
It looks like a fairly simple keypad with large enough keys, but no matter how slow you type you still end up hitting the wrong keys. Thus I ended up using the standard keypad and the QWERTY being unused. Once again LG’s keypad only manages to compete with the iPhone in design, but comes nowhere close in actual typing.
Multimedia
Camera
The LG KM900 Arena has a 5 megapixel CMOS camera with autofocus and Schneider Kreuznach optics. The camera also has an LED lamp for low light photography. Apart from that it is also capable of recording videos up o 720 x 480 resolution at 30 fps.
The camera application can be launched by pressing and holding the shutter key. The camera takes about four seconds to start after that. The phone can be held vertically or horizontally while shooting, the orientation of the UI and the captured images changes accordingly. All the options are arranged on the left side of the screen. You can change the settings which includes the resolution, color modes, white balance, timer, autofocus, geo-tagging, etc. You can also adjust the exposure level and change into macro and standard focussing mode. The camera supports face tracking which focuses on human faces when they are detected and also geo-tagging which provides co-ordinates of where exactly the picture was taken with the help of the built-in GPS.
The quality of the captured images was above average. I have definitely seen better quality images from 5 megapixel phones before, such as from the Nokia N82. The images had an over-sharpened look. Many a time you can see jagged edges around the subject. Also the details were sacrificed to reduce the noise levels. The colors were also over exaggerated to look more appealing. There was also a bit of noise in the images. While in macro mode the camera often refused to focus on the main subject.
Like when photographing a flower, the phone constantly kept focussing on the leaves behind. Also due to the poor display visibility of the display under sunlight, you are unable to see whether the images have been captured properly and only notice the flaws when you are indoors or on the PC screen. Our test unit also seemed to have a problem where objects on the extreme left where out of focus.
Photography at night should be avoided on the Arena because of the woefully inadequate flash that has a range of only around one feet.
As for the video recording, the quality was very good. However I wonder why LG chose to use 3GP format instead of DivX as in the Viewty or even MP4 as in some of the other phones. The second microphone was good to record the sounds but due to its position was easy to cover by your hand. The phone can also record videos on slow or fast motion. The resolution however is only restricted to 320 x 240 in these modes.
Music, Images & Videos
The music player supports MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA and WAV formats. The interface is different from other touchscreen phones I have used and somewhat similar to the other LG phones. The player does not have a Now Playing screen. The track starts playing right in the playlist itself. When you press play on a track in the list, the playback controls pop-up from the bottom and the track name you clicked on expands and shows the full track info along with the progress bar, album art and the time. You can change the visualization that runs behind the track name. To change the list from album to tracks, to artists you have to press on the button on the top and select from the list. The button on the top left gives additional options such equalizers, etc.
The sound quality of the phone was very good. The bass was a bit weak and did not extend all the way to the bottom; however the mids and the highs were wonderfully crisp and clear. They are also sufficiently loud. The phone touts the Dolby Mobile badge proudly on its back. It could be activated by going through the equaliser list or just clicking the on-screen shortcut button. What the Dolby Mobile mode does is it creates a pseudo multi-channel sound feel from just a stereo source, so you feel as if you are surrounded by speakers.
Apart from that there is no alteration in sound. I personally do not like such effects and prefer listening to music as close to the original as possible. However if you like it then you might like the Dolby Mobile mode as well. There are a dozen more such presets available in the phone as well but there is no manual equalizer which is something I really wanted to boost the weak low frequency response of the phone.
The loudspeaker on the phone was quite powerful and due to its forward position it was always pointing towards you and you don’t have to worry about muffling it either. The quality of the sound was also quite good.
The phone came bundled with in-ear earphones that looked impressive but sounded just like most bundled earphones (that is to say absolutely rubbish). The lag during volume adjustment was really infuriating however and many a times the phone would just freeze while adjusting the volume control. However it would take in your input while it is stuck and after a while when it would come out of its trance it would suddenly apply all the key inputs that you tried till then.
The phone also has an FM radio. The interface design is really good and this is something that LG could not have copied from the iPhone (cause the latter does not have a radio) so kudos to them. There is a large dial which you use to scan through the radio frequency and is extremely easy, not to mention fun, to use. You can save the stations in the presets at the bottom of the screen. The phone offers 30 presets to save your stations. The radio also supports RDS. The quality of the reception was very good outdoors however was a bit patchy indoors.
The images and videos can be viewed from the Gallery. They are displayed in a grid of thumbnails. You can open and slide your finger on the screen to go to the next and previous image. The images slide smoothly on the screen and unless they are of really high resolution there is not much of a lag. Turning the phone around displays them in landscape resolution. You can pinch and zoom in on the image just as on the iPhone.
As for the videos, the Arena turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Although the phone supports DivX and XviD you cannot just drag and drop your DVD rips on the phone and expect them to play. In fact it is customary to convert the videos from the supplied DivX Mobile converter which reduces the resolution a lot. And since the Arena has a really high resolution display with a high pixel density the videos look absolutely tiny at 100% zoom and you have no option but to zoom in further to fit the screen and pixellate them. It does play 3GP and MP4 videos at high resolution however and that is the option I would recommend people to take instead of sticking to either DivX or XviD.
Web Browsing & GPS Navigation
The LG KM900 Arena comes with a good web browser built-in. It can open full fledged PC websites quite well. The speed of page loading was not as good as the Opera Mobile found in the Windows Mobile phones or the S60 browser however. Also, the LG browser does not open full YouTube PC site and you have to rely on the mobile version of YouTube whose videos look tiny on the screen of the Arena. Another thing that looks tiny is the fonts while browsing and you have to zoom into the page to read or select links. You can browse the web on either GPRS/EDGE, 3G or the Wi-Fi, but you cannot stream videos over Wi-Fi and you need to rely on the GPRS/EDGE connection (or 3G if you are one of the lucky few in India) which can be quite expensive for those on a limited data plan.
The GPS can be used from the Google Maps software that comes pre-installed. The GPS takes a while to get a lock-on on the satellites. In my testing it took about 5 minutes initially to make a cold start but after a while it would lock on quickly. There is no option for voice navigation though as in Nokia phones so the GPS is not used to the fullest and only restricted to the Google Maps and geo-tagging of images.
The receiver for the GPS is located in the battery cover, so it is advised not to remove the cover while using the GPS, or the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for that matter.
Battery Life
The LG KM900 Arena has a 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery. Compared to the plethora of features that the phone has a 1000 mAh battery was never going to be enough, and as I found out while testing, it wasn’t. The phone just lasts for a day of usage on a full charge, if you use all the features of the phone which is really disappointing. In fact I wasn’t even using the phone heavily and had I done that the phone could not even last for a day. Considering this the battery life of the Arena can best be described as poor.
Verdict
The LG KM900 Arena is a really attractive and classy looking device that manages to catch attention when you use it in public. The display quality indoors is top notch, right from the picture quality or the touch sensitivity, which makes using the phone a pleasure. The audio quality is also commendable and combined with the built-in 8 GB memory and the memory card slot it can act as a good portable music player.
The camera quality however is not the best, especially the video recording. The interface design although heavily inspired by the iPhone is very easy to use. What works against the phone are the glitches in the UI, the weak camera flash, the display performance outdoors under sunlight and its battery life. The Arena is not on sale yet, but will be launched at Rs. 24,990. At that price, the Arena offers really good features, however the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
