Playtime with LG Arena

MANILA, Philippines - Bestsellers usually have sequels. From the crowd favorite LG Cookie, here comes another phone from LG that brings its line of full touch-screen phones to another level.

The LG Arena, or KM900, is obviously a follow through of the LG phone that enabled many mobile users to join the touch generation. This new phone also has a three-inch diagonal touch display but instead of the Active Flash user interface, it has a 3D S-Class UI that considerably improves the touch-screen experience.

The main advantage of this new user interface is that the phone now has four home-screens instead of one. On each of these home-screens, one can customize the features or widgets.

On the main home-screen, for example, one can put the widgets for writing a text message, the message inbox, contacts, the dialing pad, and video calling. This makes it easy to create and send a new text message, to open, read and reply to new messages, dial a phone number, make a video call or find contacts.

On the second home-screen, one can put the widgets for music, FM radio, voice recorder, alarms, camera, video camera, moviemaker, gallery and games and apps and all other multimedia features.

On the third home-screen, one may put together the widgets for connectivity such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Web browser. On the fourth, one can put the tools such as calendar, alarms, memo, organizer, stopwatch, calculator, world clock and others.

Switching from one home-screen to another is made easy by a 3D cube, which one merely flips to transfer from one home-screen to another.

Aside from the greatly improved user interface, another major upgrade to this touch-screen phone is that it comes fully loaded with features.

One couldn’t actually ask for more in this slim package: it has a five-megapixel camera and can record videos at 720 x 480 (30 fps). It has a player that can run MP3, AAC, AAC+ and WMA music files as well as a DivX/XviD/MPEG4 player for videos.

It comes with FM radio, voice recorder and voice memo. These are complemented by a document viewer for DOC, XLS, PPT and PDF files.

On the connectivity side, it is fitted with Bluetooth v 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g for wireless Internet connectivity, a WAP 2.0 browser for surfing the Web and connects to the computer via USB. All these are handy features if the phone is used as an office tool.

For this reviewer, the most functional tool so far in the LG Arena is the voice recorder, which, even with already more than four hours of recorded interviews on file, still has 545 hours of recording time available.

Thanks to the 8GB internal memory that is even expandable to 32GB on micro SD (Transflash card), one doesn’t have to worry about not having enough memory for recorded sounds, photos and even videos.

This 3G phone has a standard Li-Ion 1000 mAh battery and claims a standby time of up to 300 hours, talk time of up to three hours and 50 minutes and music play of up to 30 hours.

However, if the phone is multi-tasking — and usually it is — that is, doing multiple tasks at the same time such as MP3 player or FM radio is on while sending or receiving text messages, voice calling or Web surfing, the battery drains up fast. One needs to bring a charger to work because the battery does not usually last the usual eight-hour workday or a typical six- to eight-hour school day. But of course, it depends a lot on how the phone is used. For simple sending and receiving text messages and the occasional voice calls, the battery usually lasts the day.

However, for a phone which LG itself has called a multimedia powerhouse, it is quite impossible not to use its many useful features, the camera and video camera being the two most useful features next to the MP3 player and the FM radio.

Sometimes, one forgets though that this is still a gadget and not a workhorse. When the going gets tough, the phone seems to say enough, and hangs. In instances like this, a reboot is necessary and usually brings the phone back to its snappy self.