LG ARENA Preview

Phone contacts, Organizer, Messages and Internet:

Don´t think that everything is coming up roses with the LG ARENA though. Once you navigate your way away from the screens we told you about, you are about to face a menu that resembles one of those found on the first Motorola phone to ever hit the market. (Demonic laughter). Stay calm and don´t go anywhere. Actually what you see is the old face of the company we know all too well, only clear of annoying bugs and jazzed up a bit.

Say, being able to see a quite more contact info fields on-screen makes adding contacts no longer feel like a 15 century torture, plus you can navigate between them far more easily. Filtering contacts works much better and allows you to search in both parts of the name, not only one and you can actually do it by typing numbers rather than letters, say, entering 6-3-6 leads to Neo, meaning you can perform searches with the dialing keypad as well.



You shall read more about the calendar in the coming review, but we can say it looks really good and can be viewed in a number of ways. But we just have to tell you about the calculator and the alarms, since we are captivated by the awesome interface. You can set a number of different alarm times and aside from being a real eye-candy, the quick alarm option (take a look at the picture) allows you to set an alarm for something that´s about to happen within the next hour. We just hope this helps our editor take his medicine by the quarter of an hour just like the doctor ordered. Calculator works in two different modes, the first one features all typical basic functions; the second one is geared to people who have made it through third grade math. Since all of us, unfortunately, don´t seem to belong to the second group we are more pleased with all these small things like the properly designed go-back button that perfectly go with the overall look of the calculator.



The messages menu has been through some major changes. Getting in takes you right into incoming messages, grouped by date. Well, it seems LG has finally come to their senses and got what customers want. You can easily reply to a previously received message and there´s a separate button that gets you to writing right away. The phone delivers MS Exchange support as well to help you sync emails, contacts, calendar entries and tasks with your company server on the fly. All these goodies would´ve been wasted if the keypad was below par. Fortunately it´s up to the task even if all buttons are a bit small, especially if you´re intent on using your both hands to type.





Well, all you mobile internet fans, rejoice! The built-in browser is really good, despite it needs some finishing touches if it´s to pose a threat to the Apple´s mobile Safari browser. Multi-touch is used to zoom in on things, pretty much the same way as on the iPhone and even if less smooth, it´s far better than the implementation on PRADA II. Actually, it´s exactly speed and fast response that the browser needs in order to get closer to the market leader. Let´s hope the retail version it´s properly optimized so you won´t need to wait until what you´ve zoomed in on gets larger. Let´s get a move on and talk about the multimedia functions, since it´s expected to be one of the strengths of the LG Arena.