Wednesday, June 10, 2009

LG Arena KM900

A beautiful phone finished in brushed aluminium, and polished white aluminium, with a narrow strip of chrome running right around the outer rim of the facia. The body feels solid due to all that aluminium. The rear cover is also metal and while it’s difficult to get off owing to the silly retention used, once removed we observed that the interior is neat with the ability to remove the SIM card and microSD memory without having to remove the battery. The display is large and very crisp and the menu icons are undoubtedly the best we’ve seen, much better than the ones by Nokia and even Apple. The front panel call and menu buttons are touch activated and work pretty well. The phone’s interface is snappy, although it offers some lag while using the camera and other multimedia features. The menu layout is excellent and the menu structure itself intuitive and usable. Being a capacitive touch display there is no stylus and you need to get by with your fingers. This works well throughout the menus and LG really seems to have got things right in this regard. The only area that needs improvement re: the the touch interface is the onscreen number keypad — it is slow and not at all up to our expectations. Apple does theirs much better and sending messages on the iPhone, while far from easy, is much simpler a task than on this phone. That being said it’s a great effort. The volume and camera buttons on the side extrude slightly so as to not spoil the sleek lines of the phone, but are usable thanks to good button travel and feedback. The camera takes good images with nice colour and good detailing. The camera settings are pretty rich with a lot of fine tuning available. The KM900 has a rather mediocre antenna when compared to the Nokia phones and while call quality is good in zone 1 and acceptable for zone 2 it’s nowhere near as good as some of the Nokia handsets. Music quality is also in the same region in terms of performance; it’s good but could be better.

The Arena KM900 is a sweet looking handset with a really nice touch display that is functional without the need of a stylus. It’s gimmicky, usable and feature-rich and at an MRP of Rs. 24,990 is something that we can recommend if you’re looking at something similar to the iPhone but at a good Rs. 10,000 less. At this price point, its only competition is the Nokia Xpress Music 5800 that has a couple of extra features and offers better call and music quality. But if those things are not as important as the interface then the KM900 is the phone for you.

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