Photos: LG Arena KM900 hands-on

LG's Arena -- the phone, not the venue in Birmingham -- is LG's brand-new flagship 5-megapixel handset for 2009, undressed this week here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Our comic-readin', white shoe-wearin' bearded stud Rich Trenholm briefed you on what's hot about this phone, but trust us not to just leave it at that. We spent some time examining the Arena, its 3D interface and its features, up close and intimidatingly personal.

LG's made all that fancy 3D menu-animation jiggery-pokery look smooth, and free of low frame-rate clunkiness. The spinning menus actually look like they do in the promo videos LG was showing off, and mad as it sounds, that's not common.

The phone itself feels smart and the all-metal enclosure is sturdy, like a stallion bathed in concrete, then frozen. Then coated in more concrete. Menus are attractive, but sweet holy mother of all things silicon -- was there any need to have this many menus?

Clue: no, there wasn't.

It felt like there were different styles of menu all offering access to the same features -- perplexing, and a foreign journalist we found ourselves talking to at the stand felt the same. True, he was probably confused by our fancy English words, but his facial expressions were clear: too many menus, too little focus.

But that's not to say we didn't like it, but it'll just take a whole bunch of getting used to. It felt like it was trying too hard to be different and fancy, and had lost focus on being easy to use.

Bounce your way through all our hands-on shots over the next few pages if you want to see what we saw. The LG Arena will be on sale in the UK in March.