Hat trick of LG phones for MWC, Mini ships in UK

Samsung and LG have promised more smartphones with open operating systems this year, but they continue to unleash their real firepower for their proprietary featurephones. The Jet, the Chocolate 2, the Arena – these stand out from the crowd far more than the Galaxy, and LG didn’t even bother to come up with a snappy name for its Android phones, GW620 and GT540. True to form, the Arena Max is a different matter, packing all the features of the original Arena, plus everyone’s favorite top end processor, the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon.

Arena Max (aka LU9400) should turn up next week at Mobile World Congress and hit US and Japanese markets in March, followed by Europe. Like several of LG’s recent big hitters, including the first Intel Atom phone, this has a large body with the ability to view content in widescreen format. It sports a 3.5-inch touchscreen and is physically heftier than Arena 1, which was marketed as being superslim. It also claims to have improved the responsiveness of that handset’s screen, which was a little sluggish considering it’s touted as a gaming phone.

Otherwise, the Max has much the same spec sheet as its predecessor, though it adds Wi-Fi. It comes with 8Gb of internal storage and microSDHC card slot to expand this to 40Gb, plus GPS, Bluetooth and a surprisingly low key 5megapixel camera. Like most LG high end models, the emphasis is on video, with widescreen VGA screen resolution, video output to a TV screen, and support for DivX and Svid video formats.

The first Arena KM900 was the big headline grabber at last year’s Mobile World Congress, largely because it introduced LG’s 3D S-Class user interface, which will now be run across most of the firm’s smartphones, regardless of OS.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait a full six months for the new Arena, as we did for the first one. Certainly coming to the UK, at least, in short order is another MWC debut for the Korean firm, the superslim and simply named LG Mini. This is the company’s thinnest handset ever and will be available in the UK next week, online (carrier deals to be announced).

The Mini (also known as GD880) has a 3.2-inch touchscreen, 5-mp camera with face detection, HSDPA, GPS and Wi-Fi, and the S-Class user interface. Like many sleek, mid-priced handsets, it is heavily geared to social networking, and comes with LG’s new Social Network Connect software to integrate Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and make access quick and visual. Like the Chocolate 2, the display has a 16:9 aspect ratio. The lack of buttons, metal finishings and square corners position it at the premium end of LG’s range.

Also making its first public appearance at the MWC show will be LG’s second Android model, GT540.