LG launches Arena: Cubists pleased

LG Australia today launched its multimedia flagship phone for 2009, the LG Arena, featuring the company's latest user interface known as S-Class.

While the name S-Class means little to most of us, the important thing to note is the user interface's rotating cube-like appearance. The Arena sports a four-faced home-screen system offering quick access to contacts, media, shortcuts and a widgets pane similar to that seen on LG's Renoir.

Important to achieving an impressive interface is processing power, so LG has included a dedicated graphics processor to power the various animated elements of the display. From a brief hands-on at the launch of the Arena, the interface seemed reasonably zippy, considering the amount of animation involved.

Multimedia is undoubtedly the Arena's strength. The handset will play MPEG 4, DivX and XviD video files natively, and display them on a 3-inch WVGA (480x800) resolution display. It has a top-mounted 3.5mm headphone jack for plugging in your favourite headphones as well. Searching for photos and video files is similar to Apple's CoverFlow system, with a side-scrolling animated menu.

The Arena will be available in Australia from Vodafone at launch, with Telstra and Optus to follow shortly after.