LG Arena not at all overshadowed by new smartphone launches

Now that the LG arena is finally available in the UK, from O2, T-Mobile and Orange, its about time we reviewed it properly. I first saw the LG Arena back in February at the Mobile World Congress, and hands on I declared it the first iPhone rival that uncovered new ground in its touch interface.

Given that it grabbed the biggest headlines then, and that since then there have been so many new iPhone-alikes launched, it has been pushed back into the background in terms of press coverage, but it shouldn’t have been.

The iPhone has been with us a while, and yet until the Arena came along it remained head and shoulders above all the other touch screen phones on the market. Many of these have been designed with copying in mind, or in order to bring the cheapest touch screens to handsets, so that there was only a cursory similarity between the new devices and the function of the iPhone. Handset makers just didn’t seem to understand what touch was all about.

But with the LG Arena’s all new 3D cube interface, the reality of the phone makes it very much a real threat to the iPhone.

It is fitting perhaps that LG, which invented the first modern touch screen in the Prada, has come full circle and seen the light. In the Arena KM 900 device, touch has been embedded at almost every level.

There have been many touch phones over the years, and the Prada was launched prior to the iPhone, but was swamped by the publicity of the Apple product, quite simply because Apple took far greater design advantage of touch. Apple also used a capacitative sensitive screen so that cold objects don’t register and only fingers do, something which not every iPhone copier has taken on board, mostly using resistive screens which work better with an all too easy-to-lose stylus. The Arena doesn’t make that mistake.

The 3D Cube interface which has already been widely applauded in the press, really works and you can rapidly navigate it backwards and forwards, fast and slow. The phone has an alternative control layout, instead of the 3D spinning cube, as a simple 4 by 4 panel (very iPhone but turn it sideways and it becomes 8 by 4 smaller panels), touching each icon releases a widget or an application. As a 4 x 4 layout it can’t show all 32 functions which the phone has, but you can use your finger to scroll the top reel of 4 icons around like a fruit machine reel or a Rubic’s cube, showing the hidden options which are part of that dimension (whether it was media, or settings or whatever).

When looking at the contacts application you only have to tap the screen to expand an entry, rather than generate a new screen. Touch has also been embedded into the FM radio with a 3D graphic of an old fashioned radio tuning button, which you can touch left and right to tune a radio station.

In the same way you set alarms by tapping on the clock to expand it and then moving the minute hand round to where you want it by chasing it with a touching finger.

Throughout playing with an Arena there is an example of touch at every application level. In each case you get the feeling a separate team has sat down and asked how to make the controls touch based, and how much more deeply touch actions could go to eliminate layers of effort.

If the iPhone opened everyone’s eyes, and the immediate copies only served to demonstrate how laboured most handset vendor’s design efforts are, then the KM900 Arena shows that at least one of the majors is finally catching up.

LG has put the same cube interface on a Windows phone (GM 730) and will use it above many of its new planned Windows phones we expect. But in our view Windows Mobile runs too slowly to respond to touch all that well, so we’d expect more and more Android devices to comes out of LG next year using this interface

The Arena is a 3G phone, comes with Dolby Mobile sound, a new introduction to this range; 8GB of onboard memory expandable to 40 GB; a 5 Megapixel camera; full widescreen VGA screen resolution on a 3 inch screen (measured diagonally), and it calls the 3D cube its S-Class User Interface, so look out for that appearing elsewhere in its range. The device can playback video on a TV screen, and supports both DivX and Xvid video formats and is finally available after 6 months of waiting.

We will always remember that Apple created the touch genre, but the Arena signals the fact that none of the top handset vendors will not rest until their product ranges have gone beyond the iPhone in feature and function.