LG re-launches into the iPhone-clone ARENA

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 16 February 2009 10:42

IT Industry - Market

Other tidbits from another UnwiredView article also list these features (and more great pics):

- Multi-touch to easily expand and collapse Web pages and pictures

- Dedicated multimedia chip for fast Flash UI operation

- Rotational on-screen dials with haptics feedback for various settings (radio, clock, etc;)

- The sides of 3D cube  are for the following panels: multimedia, shortcuts, widgets, phone functions

- Horizontal quick menu access on the bottom

- Took 100 man years to develop
 
So, while some of the specs from UnwiredView are yet to be 100% confirmed, they do look “on the money”. We’ll all know more when LG announces the specifics at a Mobile World Congress press event in the next few days.

There's no word yet either on enterprise/business-class email synchronisation or even something like the licensing of Microsoft's ActiveSync technology, something we've seen happen with the iPhone, on Nokia models and even with Google recently becoming the latest licensee.

Let's hope LG has done this too, so the Arena becomes as much as business phone as a fashion phone.

No pricing details are yet available, but we do know the phone will launch in Australia in March, and if we were to guess at a price, we’d have to say around the AUD $1000 mark, give or take a couple of hundred dollars.

So, is the LG Arena an iPhone-killer or just a coulda-beener? We're still yet to see, but so far, it's clearly LG's best phone yet - despite seemingly set to come with a lower-megapixel camera than the Arena's predecessor, the LG Renoir.