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Written by Marko Tanaskovic
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Sunday, 16 August 2009 |
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Page 1 of 2   When Apple iPhone was introduced few years ago it brought revolution to PDA market that other manufactures were not prepared for. Although we don’t find iPhone to be the best PDA that ever existed on the face of earth (no it really isn’t) numbers don’t lie and the fact is that iPhone is one of the best selling PDAs ever. Because of this other manufacturers couldn’t afford themselves to sit on their hands and do nothing about it, so making the iPhone “killer” quickly became favorite sport of many IT companies. As result of created market environment we got new LG KM900 Arena PDA in our test lab strait from LG’s assembly line.
When we took LG Arena for the first time out of the box we were surprised by its “business look”. Build quality is very good and alloy frame on the front side and aluminum back cover only add to that impression. Display covers almost the whole area that is framed by mentioned front side frame, except the area reserved for control touch sensitive buttons (that we cannot get used to).TFT display with 384,000 pixels offers very good picture with nice amount of brightness and contrast. Finger-touch navigation is easy to get used to so stylus isn’t necessary. LG Arena supports multi-touch so zooming is very easy. Implemented S-Class Touch UI is optimized for finger navigation and based on “cube” shape. We were pleasantly surprised with speed and responsiveness of this GUI no matter what we were doing at that moment. Of course icons layout can be customized.
Besides usual mobile phone functions there are a lot more functions that this PDA can deal with. Above all there is very rich multimedia set that allows listening to music, with support for Dolby and FM radio (3.5mm audio connector), watching DivX and XviD movies, and inevitable support for YouTube videos. Picture browser is a must no matter where did those pictures came from. Combination of Schneider-Kreuznach optics and 5MP chip resulted in one of the best cameras that can be found in PDAs. Videos can be recorded in WVGA resolution in 30fps and, interestingly, in slow motion in QVGA resolution. LG Arena is equipped with 8GB of RAM which can be expanded with microSD memory cards up to 32GB.
Beside its good multimedia features this phone is packed with some interesting business features. Support for usual Office formats is present (doc, xls, ppt, pdf), good contact and agenda application is also installed along with very good virtual keyboard. E-Mail client is also present but there is limit on how big single mail can be: 1MB. multitasking (task switching) allows only two applications to be active at the same time.
Beside all this LG Arena also has GPS module that in cooperation with Google Maps and flat rate data mobile package can be enough for most users. Since there is also web browser and WiFi module which make this PDA an Swiss knife among PDAs. PDA can be synchronized with PC via USB of Bluetooth connection.
One of the problems that face all new PDAs is autonomy. LG Arena has 1000mAh battery that allows up to 30min of talking per day and with usual WiFi, Bluetooth and multimedia activities, or up to 50h of autonomy. Overall these are good results.
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