Hi again, you are about to find out one of the most interesting forms in LG’s range, the Arena. It’s the first appearance of LG’s brand new S-Class 3D interface. As well, that is a major step over its predecessors.
Okay, we better cut the small talk and get down to—the phone itself. As you can see, it looks quite likable and compact. Although it lacks—features, its real weight grips your attention right away but unfortunately, it’s exactly what gets in the way when it comes to an overall luxurious feel about the phone.
Well you know, they say good and bad things often go hand and hand. Well, when it comes to the Arena, its small size is at the expense of the device display. It’s not that three inches is that bad but we hope to see a quite larger screen especially given its features, a 480x800pixel resolution in 16 millions colors.
Fortunately, it’s been built on the capacity of technology that are multi-touch and response really well. There are three touch sensitive keys just before the screen, Send and End buttons and the third one, right under the middle that turns the home screen into a cube. You can find more on this feature under the interface section of the preview.
Actually, only the End button turns on but the retail units will have all there three brightly lit up. We’re really pleased with all the other buttons that perfectly go with the overall design in the whole round form, wall profile look about it.
We still can not comment on their ease of use since we have only used a prototype this far. And the camera shutter and volume rocker are both located on its right hand side. The power on/off button, 3.5mm jack, and cover unlock mechanism are on the top. The charger plugs in under snugly fitting, tiny sliding flap on the left that is really handy. It’s about time we quit talking about its appearance. You can see, it’s a really likable device but its most remarkable feature is the interface. So, let’s take a closer look at it.
It’s not tough that a brand new interface goes over big with us in the way S-Class 3D does it. Well, you may be wrecking your brains where the 3D part of its name comes from. As you can see, the phone has got four home screens located onto the side walls of a cube. Let’s dive deep into this.
This is the screen where you can place shortcuts to your overused functions but you’re limited to not more than nine. You need to hold your finger pressed against any given icon and keep your finger pressed for a short while, then pick something from the pop-up list to enter the shortcut adding mode. You can freely rearrange any of them later.
Now, here is the widget screen we know all too well from the Renoir. It works after the same principle. Keep your finger pressed against any on-screen application and then you can freely move it anywhere else or add new ones.
If you need more space than what a single screen offers, you can add more below or above and just scroll between them. Well, meet our friends from the Matrix posing for our favorite contact in your honor. You guess right. Just like about everything else, this is done by holding your finger press. As a whole, using the same way of doing things feels really nice and easy to get use to.
And the fourth home screen features some multimedia player that allows you to easily load your favorite songs, pictures and video clips. We’re going to show you how to whole thing works but bear in mind, you’re limited to only 15 items. We believe it’s quite useful an application that lets you keep your favorite multimedia content at hand whenever you feel like it.
Unfortunately, the landscape mode is only available when you watch videos or browse your pictures. All functions are available in the main menu sorted by relevant categories on a single screen best viewed in the landscape mode. You will need to scroll the row sideways if you’re in portrait mode to get to certain options. Well, fortunately, you can rearrange all icons so the ones you use the most come first. And it’s done this way in its mode.
What creates a great impression is the S-Class 3D interface is—with short animated transition effect that play really smoothly. All details are quite easy on the eye and have been taken into consideration. Well done LG.
The Phone Contacts have taken a major turn for the better, alongside of the Renoir. Adding a contact is way easier with you being able to see more fields at the same time. Searches are conducted by name, family name or entering digits with the keyboard.
The Calendar deserves admiration as well and its screen can be viewed in a number of ways. You can set a number of different alarm times. And decide from being a real—the Quick Alarm option allows you to set an alarm for something that is about to happen within the next hour. Entering your message box gets it right into your Inbox without incoming messages sorted by dates. You can respond to a message right away and to touch single file is really easy using the icon at the bottom of the screen.
The browser of the phone is quite good as well. Although, it just can not keep up with Safari Mobile. Zooming, it can on things feels comfy through the multi-touch technology. Unfortunately, we found a certain delay which made it somewhat unhandy to use. And yet, even websites featuring a lot of multimedia content are properly visualized. Plus, the phone has got WiFi. So, surfing the web fills a fine job.
As we mentioned already, the LG Arena is a multimedia device that packs a lot of punch. Well, no one can take it for a camera phone but yet, it has got a 5MMP Auto-Focus camera with a LED flash and toward goes over big with us, is its interface.
It’s a whole lot better than the one found on the Renoir and it looks just like the interface of an actual digital camera. We got carried away over the gallery in a landscape mode. You switch it on and it turns into something quite similar to the iPhone’s cover flow, with the images supporting downloads. Cool, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, the Arena cannot play HD videos and to supported cardex unlimited to the just two, DivX and MPEG4. But we better wait until the retail version hits the shelves to pass a final judgment on whether or not it’s of any use when it comes to watching movies.
The music player is somewhat good. Browsing albums is something we do like. A list of artist name pops up on a screen from their art, well visualized separate CDs. When you start a song in a landscape mode, the player appears right within the song of list. And scrolling down leads to the Album cover and background effects dropping kind of side but you can still change all of it to a different song or stop the current one via the controls below. Well, that is all folks.
We hope this preview has helped you get a rough idea of what to expect from the LG Arena. We believe it’s worth a while because of its beautiful and comfy S-Class 3D interface. Whether or not it has what it takes to challenge the kink of all touch screen phones, the iPhone remains to be seen as something we can get down to when we finally get our hands on the retail unit. Thanks for watching.
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