There's no getting away from the market positioning of the LG Arena KM900: with a brushed steel exterior, tempered glass screen, dazzlingly clear high resolution display and Dolby Mobile sound, the Arena is a crème de la crème smartphone device.

Design

I couldn't take my eyes or hands off the chunky brushed steel body and tempered glass screen. If nothing else you will look pretty loaded carrying one of these babies around.

It is a tad on the bulky side, although it weighs less then the iPhone, and the wealth of features inside would explain the width.

The LG Arena is all touchscreen with no buttons around or below the 3-inch screen. Aside from the volume, camera and power button on the sides this is pure minimalism at work.

High resolution screen

After browsing the menu, watching video clips or taking pictures on the Arena you will truly know the meaning of a high resolution screen for a mobile handset.

The WVGA 16m colour TFT screen is glorious and renders everything in such clear detail. This, for me, was one of the highlights of this handset.

User Interface

LG has taken a slightly different approach to navigating the touchscreen smartphone. Its S-Class 3D interface splits the homescreen into several different dedicated areas including one for widgets, one for media, one for contacts, and the main one for direct access to things like email, messaging, the web, or whatever it is that you use most regularly.

The point is to give users the quickest possible access to what they want, and these are all customisable.

The dedicated touch button at the bottom of the screen takes you to the 'cube' which you can rotate by flicking from side to side to access the 'face' you want.

If you prefer access to everything at once you can go straight to the root menu which lists all the apps and features in different categories through Reel Scrolling, so you have 'reels' of apps and things that you can scroll through and browse.

The haptic feedback was good and used to great effect in the radio tuner, you can feel the dial as you spin it to tune in.

Unfortunately, I have heard others talk about the response time on text input. I felt this a little myself but it wasn't enough to completely put me off typing on the Arena.

Features

You name it and it's on the Arena. They are too numerous to mention but it has all the expected ones including notepad, calculator, world clock, web browser, camera, FM radio, A-GPS, Exchange Mail, and many more.

Media

With 8GB of Flash memory already on board and the ability to store a further 40GB by way of MicroSD I cannot recommend this smartphone enough as a portable media centre. Why? Because it supports the DivX file format, which, as many of you will know, is what your TV shows, movies etc are stored as on your latop or computer right now.

Coupled with this is the Dolby Mobile sound and 3.5mm headphone jack, so do yourself a favour, load all your movies. Music etc onto this, invest in a good pair of headphones and you will never look back.

Camera

The camera and video camera are great quality. In fact with 5megapixels and a very responsive autofocus I would be happy snapping away on this. The sound quality on video playback is also noteworthy.

Verdict

Aside from the fact that the shortcuts sitting on the homepage for Google, YouTube etc go to things that run in the LG web browser when I keep expecting some magical apps to fire up, this phone is outstanding. As multimedia handsets go this is a top performer and great all-rounder.

Available now from 3.

By Marie Boran

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