LG Arena First Impressions Review - Value & Comparisons

Pricing & Value
Pricing for the Arena has not yet been announced, so we can't peg its value relative to competing devices yet. However, we would expect LG to put a premium price on its flagship device

Comparisons

iPhone 3G - The Arena is not LG's first attempt to take down the iPhone but the Arena looks like it could do the job on paper with still image and video capture specs that vastly overshadow those of the iPhone 3G and an expansion card slot to augment its memory even more. It will probably be a matter of personal preference on the user interface between the 2, but in our short time with the Arena, the iPhone 3G's interface is still much cleaner and more intuitive in comparison, with no funky cubes and multiple screens and reels to figure out and flip through.

Samsung Instinct - As another touchscreen device, the Instinct has a lot in common with the Arena on the surface. However, we found the Instinct to have pretty poor still image picture quality and slow to access media. It lacks Wi-Fi, but it did have a native email client and offer Microsoft Exchange support as well. On paper, however, the Arena has it beat hands down in just about every regard hardware-wise.

Blackberry Storm - Advertisements for the Storm emphasized its multimedia abilities given its large screen for video playback and included multimedia software. Unfortunately, we didn't find the Storm's multimedia abilities to be all that fabulous, but it still had all the standard business-oriented Blackberry capabilities we expected, albeit in a less-stable firmware package than is typical of Blackberrys. The Arena probably won't match the Storm as a business tool but it does offer all of the native applications needed to keep a busy user on track out of the box. We won't know for sure until we get the full details on the Arena's synchronization details, but the Arena may not be all play despite its heavy multimedia leanings.

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