Basic functions
Until now LG Arena is a really cool device, but nothing’s perfect. As soon as we want to get to different features from the main menu, we can notice some slowdown. There’s a solution for this too, as the phone supports multitasking, we can have up to nine applications running in the background. We can switch between these with the square-shaped touchkey between the call handling buttons, and using this method we get a lightning fast speed.
The phonebook can store 1000 contacts. Here the interface is black and orange colored on a white background. Unfortunately rotation won’t work here, so we get a portrait list. Scrolling is basically great, but that’s no use if we have tons of contacts, we need to search. There’s a quicksearch on the top, first I thought it filters the list only if we click on the arrow after typing the letters, but that’s not correct. The thing is that the filter is so slow that we won’t notice it working. The other option is to use the search function from the options menu, which works faster, but we don’t know why. The pop-up text entry window displays a virtual phone keypad, which is okay, but filtering is really slow. Each contact can have quite a large amount of extra details attached, a photo and a ringtone as well, so this is okay. We can select our “favorite” contacts, these will be displayed on one of the four panels I’ve described before.
Messaging is usually the most difficult thing to be made good on touchscreen phones. LG Arena is exceptionally great in this matter, as the gyroscope works when entering text, so the display is rotated and we get a QWERTY keyboard. When held vertically, we have to use a standard phone keypad, so if both of our hands are free, we should use the landscape view and the full QWERTY keyboard.
It might be due to the capacitive display, but I think it’s also because of the fine resolution that the chance of mistyping is practically minimal, I’ve never in my life have seen such a good virtual keyboard, although I’ve though after BlackBerry Storm that there will be nothing more to be seen in this industry. This keyboard, however, is world champion, and the default layout has special characters, so this gets such a huge bonus point that won’t fit on the 3” screen. Another bonus goes for the copy-paste feature, which is very easy to use.
As for the features, the messaging menu has an SMS and MMS editor, it displays these in a chronological order, we can read them only in a vertical view, the screen can be rotated only during editing. As a bonus we have a chat-like view for those like it (me, for example). The email client is in a separate menu item and I’ve been surprised on first launch that Arena can communicate with Exchange servers. Furthermore it’s so intelligent that it detects what operator’s SIM card is in use and automatically configures the email address provided by the network. Besides these we can set up additional email accounts and there is a wizard to help the user in the process. This tries to guess what kind of POP3 and SMTP servers can be used. Attachments are of course supported.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
