Rather than waiting for the
KM900 to get lost amongst hundreds of other handsets set to vie for attention at Mobile World Congress, LG has decided it best to go ahead and make its newest touchscreen handset official a few days early. The so-called Arena, which will take the crown as LG's "flagship phone for 2009," is hoping to wow onlookers with its dynamic 3D S-Class user interface. According to Dr. Skott Ahn, president and CEO of LG Mobile: "The direct, intuitive and dynamic S-Class UI will be unlike anything that has appeared on a mobile phone before." We're not quite sure we believe all
that just yet, but there's little doubt this bugger will be keen on multimedia. Other specs include integrated
Dolby /
DivX technology, support for HSDPA 7.2Mbps, WiFi, Assisted GPS and "far more" amenities that should be uncovered in Barcelona. Excited yet?
[Via
UnwiredView, thanks Staska]
posted Feb 8th 2009 10:16AM
YAiC
yet another iPhone Clone. when will companys start having their own ideas???
yet another iSheep clone. when will the trolls start having their own ideas???
Yes, I can't believe EVERY phone company out there is copying the iphone that copied the LG Prada.
You mean iDeas, right?
Oh my god! youre right! it's just like the iPhone!
Exept that it's silver/metallic, has different proportions, has three buttons on the front, a clearly visible camera, and a totally different OS...
But other then that, I mean, they copied the signal indicator, the speaker and mic to make calls, a rounded shape, the battery indicator and probably the clock, as well as the overall ability to make phone calls.
USRobotics/Palm created one of the first touch screen icon based input devices, the Palm Pilot, back in the 1990s. LG then released the Prada with a touch screen icon based interface with no keyboard.
Years later Apple releases the iPhone, an icon based touch screen device with no keyboard. Gotta love retroactive innovation.
http://www.itechnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/lg-prada-phone.jpg
Maybe you should start posting YAPC on all the iPhone articles. ;)
First of all, the idea for a touchscreen phone/PDA is OLD
Hewlett Packard was making Jornada's with touchscreens and built in phone a long time ago. In China and Japan they've already had touchscreen PDA's. Since 2000 I believe. When American camera phones required a clip on camera, "J Phone" had built in color cameras.
LG didn't invent the touchscreen phone. That's Balogna
Talking about the Prada is the last ditch attempt of an apple hater. I know cause I used to be one. Till iPhone cahnged my life. :-)
Now I'm Pro Apple, Pro Microsoft and the iPhone is kicking the entire cellphone industries ASS. I'm proud of it.
If Apple could produce a phone in this class now it would be forced to sell it at over 4000 $.
Until now it got by (very well) selling a copy of a 4years old LG prada, maybe in another 10 years they will manage to make a decent copy of the LG Arena too.
Kilgore
apple's iphone has every single thing it needs to be a phone and a PDA. specifically, simple upgradeability which has been perfected through itunes/appstore.
The way I see it, flashy 3D graphics are unnescessary - and they cause the phone to use more power to run which decreases battery life.
I'm not crazy about 3G games on a phone with no analog sticks or face controls. 2D games like iShoot are easier to play and plenty of fun.
talking about the iphone copied the prada IS an apple haters last ditch.
Of all the posts were iphone owners and haters go at it on this site, this has to be the first time in a while i have seen bloggers use this as ammo.
But how much differant can you make a message icon or a phone icon?? Not too much, so i can give LG and apple some slack.
Even if this is legal, and it doesn't necessarily copy the iphone outright. The fact that there are many icons that look kind of similar to the iphone, just puts the image in people mind that LG is just changing shit to copy the iphone but yet to get around the copyright laws as well. Look at those dots for the pages. Yeah, lets just put em on top you know? Make it differant!
What if a person put a nike swish going the other way or something to that effect and tried to market it and it was still legal. Yes they would be able to do it, but alot of people would still think they were an asshole for doing it. Thats why i guess finnschi said for people to come up with their own ideas.
@Flashpoint:
Calling out the Prada only comes about due to stupid comments like "yet another iPhone Clone."
LG, the maker of the Prada, is copying itself with this phone. Thats a fact.
@ Ruben,
nope, obviously LG Arena apes Samsung Omnia design.
but if u talking bout Prada, nope, Prada isn't the first touchscreen phone ever.
it's so obvious. Samsung Omnia + TouchFlo = Arena
Flashpoint, oh really, iPhone has got everything one needs in a phone/pda?
That post is the epitome of ignorance, the quintessence of parochial thought.
Here's iPhone in a nutshell:
No bluetooth music streaming and/or file transfers (video is out of the question)
No drag and drop file juggling
No Flash support inside Safari (where the heck is Opera Mobile and/or SkyFire for this thing)
No Java
No copy and paste
No front camera
No video recording
No video calls
No user replaceable battery
No radio
No VGA or higher resolution
No IR port (it's something I take for granted, using my phone as a remote for well...anything just about)
No physical keyboard
No external storage card support (Micro SDHC cards are up to 32 GB now, 8GB is NOT enough these days, especially for a media device)
No voice command (WM devices and even some "el-cheapo" phones have featured this for years now)
No MMS (it doesn't have phone-to-phone MMS, it has phone-to-air-to-phone picture sharing necessitating a data plan)
No Live TV (that doesnt require you to be connected to an app like Orb on your home PC, which defeats the purpose, why would I want to watch it on a dinky non VGA screen instead of just on my home PC when im at home anyways)
No camera flash
No camera zoom
Same old, subpar, 2 MP camera for that matter
No multitasking
No turn-by-turn voice navigation system
Limited video format support
Limited picture format support
Limited file format support in general
Only 128 MB of RAM (Cant run many apps simultaneously -- I mean not that it matters since multitasking is for all intents and purposes out of the question! New WM phones are getting 256+ MB of RAM, with 150+ MB free on bootup)
Plenty of other phones can do virtually all of the above, and some even more, such as the Touch HD, Touch Pro, Diamond, Omnia, Xperia, etc.
I look at that gui and get reminded of touchflo, not the iphone.. which might be even worse, lol.
come on guys, how much different can touch screen phone's be?? What else do you expect them to do with it? Just because it has a large lcd screen doesn't mean it's a "iphone" clone. For that matter it could be a lg dare clone, or a instinct clone.
So, this is the bastard child that resulted from HTC's TouchFlo raping the iPhone.
No, I'm not excited in the least. Answer this with all honesty: when was the last time a LG phone got any of you excited?
@Brandon,
"come on guys, how much different can touch screen phone's be??"
a Touchflo copy? yeah how much different can it be right. ass-class UI.
S class interface? What's that? Is this a totally new operating system? I feel kinda ignorant.
Looks cool tho.
it's a S-Class car
I thought this was about http://www.lgarena.co.uk/
The hardware behind it looks great, although personally 800x480 res on a 3" screen is a bit of a waste, especially when the screen seems so small in comparison to the body. And before people start jumping in screaming iPhone clone, the actual looks of the phone look much more similar to LG's other offerings like the Shine and the Prada, although I will concede that LG could and should have done a much better job with the UI it's not the layout I care about but the icons looks copy and pasted from the iPhone UI.
nope, it apes Samsung Omnia,
http://www.gadgettastic.com/wp-content/2008/08/samsung-omnia.jpg
wow, fantastic!
Aestetically this phone is practically identical to my Samsung Omnia, but so what?
as long as it works well and looks this fine I have no objections in designers taking inspiration from previous models.
i bet none of you drive an S-Class
Flashpoint does ;)
i voted you both down, for being tools
Here at Engadget, there is a small, pathetic, but very
persistent troll [AKA iEye] A fairy-like creature whose every waking
moment of his meaningless *life* is spent attempting to
annoy us users.
Think of him as a naked,buzzing forest sprite--darting from
tree to tree squirting tiny droplets of piss onto the
leaves; all the while, smirking and giggling at being able
to annoy us unsuspecting "adults".
Well done, little Boy. Sigmund Freud would be proud.
Looks pretty slick in my opinion, but this better be a flagship phone for a reason. LG is a great company I have been consistently impressed with their products, but if they make this a throwaway like the LG Dare, Voyager, and God knows what other name the geniuses their advertising team could come up with.
I see a Samsung Omnia with HTC's now old Touch CUBE interface
Really that’s not that in important, there are only so many ways you can make a touch screen candy bar. I just hope it really pushes the segment forward. I’d like to hear something mind blowing at MWC, what’s in this intro doesn’t say much that is truly new.
That is a rip off of the original HTC TouchFLO as seen in the HTC Touch phone.
I played around with a prototype that looked very similar to this phone. It was running on a Nvidia chip and had this cool framework that could run several apps / widgets at the same time. I was also told that the chip was able to play 720p h.264 video content with no problems. I wonder if this phone is running on the same framework/chip.
It seems that so many people have become preconditioned to think nowadays that "[running] several apps / widgets at the same time" is some sort of novel feature worthy of touting in spec sheets and reviews because the iPhone lacks this ability.
The iPhone lacks dozens of abilities, and multitasking has been something that WinMo for one has been doing elegantly for years now. Granted the horsepower was not always there in the past, but in this day and age, that's becoming a moot point more and more.
given the divx factor, i'd trade in my iPhone for this it looks nice, and if it has a lower data plan, then i'm onboard
Linux called, it wants its cheesy cube animation back.
LG should have made the whole phone the size of the black portion, made the buttons red, used a modified "sexier" version of Windows Mobile, made it incredibly thin, and called it the LG Chocolate Touch. Now that would sell.
I just spoke with Mr. Kim Lg, he says he's got a job for you: either as chief of marketing strategies or sweeping the garage's toilets floors. Can't remember which one.
This one resembles Samsung's Omnia to a T, from what little images we can see.
LG actually makes pretty good phones, if only their software would improve on reading the SD cards. That was the problem with my Viewty and I sold it off. Otherwaise their phone is extremely easy to use and very fast on touch interface response.