Unboxed – LG KM900 Arena

LG’s latest touch-phone recruit made our Top 10 phones of Mobile World Congress – but now the KM900 Arena has landed on our desk, it’s time to see if it’s still got a place in our heart after our Barcelona fling.

While its 3in, 800×480 pixel screen is on the small side when compared to the iPhone and 4.1in Toshiba TG01, it’s certainly LG’s best touch interface to date. There’s little sign of the lag that afflicted predecessors like the Prada and Viewty and the ‘S-Class 3D interface’, while not exactly brain-meltingly revolutionary, does provide a neat transition between the contacts, media and homescreens.

As you can see below, that icon-based homescreen looks uncannily like the iPhone’s – only a bit more cluttered and fiddly to use. And while the screen allows you to pinch and zoom like its multi-touch foe, the web browsing experience still feels a little clunky and sluggish by comparison.

Still, the Arena’s certainly not short on features, with 8GB of flash memory (plus a microSD slot), a 5MP camera (with autofocus, but only LED flash), stereo Bluetooth, an FM radio, A-GPS (for geotagging photos) and that small but important extra, a 3.5mm headphone jack.

We’ll be bringing you a full review and video soon – but why not check out our Top 10 mobile phones while you wait. Or start a chorus of ‘we want Android, we want Android…’

LG KM900 vs Apple iPhone (below)

The LG Arena has photo contacts like Nokia’s 5800 (below)