The largest Swiss Army knife in the world has 87 tools. The problem is that this beast is almost a foot wideand you may gouge out one of your eyes if you try to use it. There's a moral in theresomewhere for the LG Arena KM900, which has every feature under the sun butdoesn't quite master the art of usability.
LG Arena KM900
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
This iPhone-inspired touchscreen handset willcost you around £350 SIM-free, or is available for free on a £40-per-month T-Mobile contract.
Haven't we met before?
The Arena looks very much like a chubbier, smaller first-generationiPhone, especially from the back. It's clearly gunning for the iPhone market,so it's only fair that we compare it to the current touchphone champ.
Like most smart phones, the Arena wipes the floor with theiPhone in terms of features. It seems to have almost everything going, includingall we've ever missed in the iPhone: cut and paste, MMS, FM radio, a landscapeQwerty keypad, proper Bluetooth -- you name it.
But the iPhone didn't become an all-conquering champion because of its feature set. It managed to make smart-phone features that have beenaround for years, like the mobile Web and touchscreen, work effortlessly --and that's where the Arena falls down.
Smart but slow
Our biggest complaint about touchscreens is usually how slow they are. Whenyou only have a soft keypad to make a call or write a text, any delay betweentapping the letter and it appearing on the screen can be frustrating and leadto errors galore.
LG promised speed with the new S-Class user interface, and we did find the home screens responsive, with plenty of scope forcustomisation. The Arena's on-screen dialling pad is also snappy, butusing the keypad to write texts or emails is not so pleasant.
On the sample handset we tested, there was a slight delaybetween pressing the keys and the letters appearing, both with the alphanumeric keypad in portraitorientation, and the Qwerty keypad inlandscape mode. Also, any keys that we tapped during the lag didn'tregister, so we frequently missed letters out, rendering our messages nonsensical. Going slow and steady is the only way to get an accurate response,which will frustrate experienced texters with lightning-fast thumbs.
Unlike the iPhone, the Arena supports copy and paste within theapps we tested, such as text messaging and the Web browser. But we found thatwe occasionally struggled to place the cursor accurately. In fact, we had trouble tapping accurately throughout the user interface -- for example, whentrying to click links in Web pages.
The Arena has multitouch zoom capability to increase the size of links and makethem easier to tap, but we found it unpredictable. A quick zoom gesture oftenled to a wildly excessive zoom level, and we didn't appreciate the pop-up message that was automatically displayed after each zoom, obscuring the contentunderneath for a moment.
We did like that the Arena tried to keep us informed withmessages, but sometimes they weren't clear. For example, after schedulingautomatic updates for the CNETUK RSS feed and podcast,the Arena kindly warned us that we could be risking big data charges. At leastwe think that's what it said, basedon the Yoda-esque message: "Charged when connection for auto updates."
The Arena's podcast-subscription feature is another of the many capabilities that its Applecompetitor can't match. But some of the basic features, which we would use themost, feel unpolished. For example, when we fast-forwarded a song in the musicplayer, the icon was wrong: the Arena shows the rewinding image. Also, the musicplayer was sometimes unresponsive, which meant that the controlsappeared to stay active for a moment after we stopped pressing them.
We can accept some lag on smart phonesthat are pushing the envelope of what a small handset can do. But, with theArena, we were sometimes unsure if our taps had been read bythe system at all, which made us feel frustrated.
Snap happy
The Arena sports a 5-megapixel camera, which takes clear shots with goodcolour balance in bright light. But there's a couple of seconds' delay betweenthe shutter sound and the photo being taken, so we needed patience to get a good snap. One of our test photos looked fine close up, but was completely distorted whenviewed in the Cover Flow-like photo gallery.
There's no xenon flash, but the LED photo light is insanelybright, and the camera has a high-ISO setting for low-light situations. Italso has a secondary camera for video calling and taking self-portraits.
We loved the 720x480-pixel resolution, 30 frames per second video camera. Wetook it on a tour of CNET Towers, moving from bright sunlit areas to darkerrooms. The results looked clear and the exposure adjusted quickly tolighting changes, but the colours were slightly washed out. Video playback wassharp and smooth on the Arena's 76mm (3-inch) WVGA screen.
Sound and fury
The Arena uses Dolby Mobile, a set of digital audio-processing features that's meant to make your phone's audio output sound less like a monkey playing a kazoo. Dolby says the feature adds 'surround sound' and 'spaciousness' when you're using headphones.
We compared the sound of a lossless WAV file on the Arena to the sound of the same file on theSanDisk Sansa Fuze, one of our favourite dedicated MP3 players, usingsome beautiful Audio-Technica headphones. We found the Arena produced strong, brassy high frequenciesand a more washed-out bass, but the overall sound wasn't unpleasant.
The Arena comes with a built-in FM transmitter, sothat you can wirelessly connect it to your car radio, for example. You can also buy a chargingcradle that has a TV out for watching your mobilecontent on a big screen.
Conclusion
The LG Arena KM900 is a scrappy challenger to the iPhone's touchscreen title, but it can'tbeat the heavyweight when it comes to the secret of its success: usability. Wecan't fault the Arena's amazing wealth of features, but all those features comeat a cost: the user interface sometimes feels slow and the battery life isterrible. Our sample handset didn't even make it through one day of normal usewithout needing a charge.
If you're looking for a touchscreen phone and you can't livewithout features such as an FM radio, the Arena is worth a look. But you'll need to be patient to put up with some of its performance issues, likethe laggy keypad response.
Edited by Charles Kloet