LG KM900 Arena Review

When you switch the Arena on, it starts to look even better. The unique selling point of this phone is that it has LG’s new 3D S-Class user interface, which means you can spin-scroll through menus and rotate screens with the tip of your finger – which takes a little getting used to but is nice and simple to use. The screen also responds to gravity – via a built-in accelerometer – and will flip into horizontal mode if you turn the phone horizontally.

Getting it out of its sleep mode requires a quick jab at the ON button at the top of the device. This activates the big, full-face, high-res screen, which in turn asks you to “press & hold” a small touch square at the bottom of the screen to unlock the phone.

Holding your finger on the square for a few milliseconds makes the screen picture flip over and twirl sideways before settling on the home screen. The phone also gives vibration feedback every time a new screen is opened. The default home screen is the Widget screen, which features widgets like a clock and a call log bar that shows received messages, emails, VMS voice messages and missed calls. You can also add other widgets, like a basic calculator (the phone also has a more advanced calculator that can handle sin, cos and tan trigonometry calculations – very useful!), a radio, calendar, world clock, etc. The home screen is one of four main screens that can be flicked through by stroking the screen sideways. By pressing the cube icon on the home screen, the four main screens fold up to become the four walls of a cube that can be spun around a horizontal axis with your finger. Each of these four main screens can be selected as the home screen, providing Contacts, Multimedia, Shortcut and Widget screens.

The main screens all display a bar with four handy shortcut icons at the bottom of the screen. These shortcuts are Dialling, Contacts, Messages, and a blue icon that, when touched, pops open the mother of all shortcut screens, which contains touch icons for every function on the device. From here all functions are a mere touch away. The coolest thing about this screen is that you can either hold the phone vertically and spin-scroll through the four lines that contain eight shortcut icons each, or you can turn the phone horizontally to make the screen fall horizontally to fit all 32 icons into a single screen. After a while we found ourselves using this screen as the quickest way around the phone, rather than flipping through the cube navigation.

Among the extensive array of tools are the shortcuts to handy apps like the voice recorder (for when an inspired idea hits you), radio, stopwatch, camera (5MP with video recording), music player, movie maker, trigonometry-capable calculator, etc. – this phone comes stacked with added value toys and tools for the multimedia minded.   

The Arena’s call quality is good, with the built-in Dolby Mobile technology helping to increase earpiece clarity. It works on 2G networks (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) and 3G networks (HSDPA 2100 and HSDPA 850/1900). The Arena has a second camera for enabling video calls and has Call Settings sub-menus that can configure all call settings known to mankind.

Calling someone on your Contact list is relatively easy. Simply tap on the everpresent Contact shortcut icon to load a scroll-down list of all your contacts. The Contact list acts like a spinning wheel and, unfortunately, contacts at the bottom of the list may take a while to find, as you have to spin through all the contacts to get to the bottom. The only other way to get to these bottom contacts is to take a few seconds to touch-open a separate touch-type pad and type in the first letters of the name. Calling a number where you have to dial extra extension numbers after the initial connection has been made, can be a bit frustrating, as you first have to unlock the dial pad by pressing on an Unlock square, and then have to touch-open the dial-pad touch screen again before you can start tapping in the extra numbers.

Saving a contact is simple. Simply tap on the Contacts icon and select New Contact. The contact saving menu has all the necessary options and always asks if the contact should be saved to SIM or phone memory. Saving an unknown number to a Contact entry merely requires tapping on the number and scrolling to Save among the options that appear on the options bar at the bottom of the number. This coincidentally also reflects one of the strong points of the Arena – because it is a rich-graphics phone, all menus and submenus appear on their own separate screens or sub-screens, giving users the luxury of scrolling between the options with the tips of their fingers.

The messaging options are SMS, EMS, MMS, Email and Instant Messaging. Eerily, there’s no character counter when you start typing SMS messages, but luckily the counter pops up once you’ve used 140 characters to show 140/160 and counts it down from there.

In the beginning we had trouble getting the cursor back into the text of our messages to insert or delete text, but then we got used to the Arena’s solution for this: Using the tip of your finger to trace the typed letters will open up a small zoom bubble that magnifies the words you are scrolling over and drags the cursor over the letters that you are stroking. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it works relatively well.

All-in-all, the message editor is one of the best things about this phone. It starts off vertically with a standard thumb pad, but once you tilt it sideways, the accelerometer kicks in to spread the keypad out into a full QWERTY thumb pad – which means that you can type as fast as you can get your fingers on the correct touch keys. The only problem is that you have to wait a few seconds for the message editor to open, and then you have to wait a few seconds again for the Contact list to open. This can be annoying if you’re used to basic, low-resolution phones that are much simpler, but can jump from menu to menu with no real time lag.  

The camera delivers great pictures and video, and with the built-in flash can be used indoors or after dark (but the flash isn’t made for middle-distance shots of moving objects in bad light). Video quality is good because the Arena has the ability to record at 30 frames per second with a 720 x 480 resolution to provide near DVD quality images.

The Arena has some impressive photo editing features and, with the Movie Maker, you can also make slideshow-type movies from any of the photos in its high-capacity gallery. You simply select the photos you want, the style of the effects, the sound, etc, and the phone puts it all together in a clever slideshow montage. The best of these styles is definitely the “Old Film” style, which zooms into the photos and scrolls over them to create the illusion of a camera that is panning over a cinematic subject. At the same time, the picture is enhanced to look like an old black-and-white movie, giving a surprisingly professional, authentic feel to the whole slideshow. Such movies can easily be downloaded and used as background video for presentations or functions – no external editing required.

Photos can be edited in many ways, including a variety of filters that can be mixed and matched to create dozens of interesting graphic effects. This could be of great use to graphic artists, especially Andy Warhol fans. The editor also has menus for inserting finger-drawn lines and stamp icons of variable colour, as well as text bubbles or just plain text.

The video player has impressive graphic capabilities, and LG says the phone supports XviD and DivX files. The video recorder function records in 3gp format (H264) and the Movie Maker slideshow movies are saved as MPEG4 (.mp4) files. Photos are stored as JPG files. Of course, these video and multimedia applications are heavy on the battery, and medium usage of these will cut battery life to around 24 hours.

The addition of built-in Dolby Mobile and mobile surround sound makes for an excellent music experience. The supplied headphones are among the best we have seen and sit comfortably in the ear. Sound is absolutely fantastic with the enhancements from Dolby really bringing out the higher frequency noises that normally get cut out. Also, the Dolby Mobile system can take any stereo signal and convert it to surround sound – providing a more immersed sound. The touch-screen finger-scrolling menu of the Arena also means that music files are easy to access – simply spin the wheel to get to your favourite files.

The Arena has an internal memory capacity of 8GB, which can be expanded with an SDHC-compatible microSD card of up to 32GB capacity. The card slot is under the back plate, but that’s not too big a problem as the back plate comes off easily without requiring the phone to be switched off.

Like most high-end phones these days, the clock and calendar keep ticking when you take out the battery, which is a real bonus. Apps include Google Maps, Vodafone Live!, a search tool, Vodafone Music and My Files (images, sounds, videos, games, applications, flash contents and documents). The Arena has a Memory Manager in the Phone Settings menu that gives pie-charted statistics on the amount of memory left in compartments such as SIM memory, handset reserved memory, handset multimedia memory and handset common memory 1 and 2.