There were lots of phones launched at the Mobile World Congress, but the device which probably grabbed some of the biggest headlines and which perhaps impinged mostly on our territory of video, was the new LG Arena, a device which many commentators felt was the first iPhone rival to go a step beyond the original iPhone design points.
The iPhone has been with us a while, and yet until this show it remained head and shoulders above all the other touch screen phones on the market. Many of these have been designed with copying in mind, or in order to bring the cheapest touch screens to handsets, so that there was only a cursory similarity between the new devices and the function of the iPhone. Handset makers just didn’t seem to understand what touch is all about.
But with the LG Arena, which was presaged by many early press reports, all highlighting its new 3D cube interface, the reality of the phone makes it very much a real threat to the iPhone.
It is fitting perhaps that LG, which invented the first modern touch screen in the Prada, has come full circle and seen the light. In the demonstration carried out by the phone division’s CEO, Skott Ahn, he showed that touch has been embedded at almost every part of the Arena KM 900 device.
There have been many touch phones over the years, and the Prada was launched prior to the iPhone, but was swamped by the publicity of the Apple product, quite simply because Apple took far greater design advantage of touch. Apple also used a capacitance sensitive screen so that cold objects don’t register and only fingers do, something which not every iPhone copier has taken on board, mostly using resistive screens which work better with an all too easy to lose stylus.
We knew something was up when ten minutes before the conference began to introduce the Arena, there was standing room only, and around 500 people filled a room designed for 300.
The 3D Cube interface which has already been widely applauded in the press, really works and Ahn made sure that he navigated with it backwards and forwards, fast and slow while the audience watched an amplified screen of what he was doing on the wall. An alternative control layout instead of a 3D spinning cube is a simple panel layout 4 by 4, each icon ready to release a widget or an application. But it can’t show all 32 functions which the phone has, so he used his finger to scroll the top reel of 4 icons around like a fruit machine reel or a Rubic’s cube, showing the hidden options that were part of that dimension (whether it was media, or settings or whatever).
When looking at the contacts application he tapped the screen to expand an entry, rather than generate a new screen, to see more information. When the FM radio was brought up, there was a 3D graphic of a tuning button, which you could touch left and right to tune the station.
He then set an alarm by expanding the clock and moving the minute hand round to where he wanted it by chasing it with a touching finger.
At every application level a team has sat down and asked how to make the control a touch based one, and how much more deeply touch actions could go to eliminate layers of function.
If the iPhone opened everyone’s eyes, and the immediate copies only served to demonstrate how labored most handset vendor’s design efforts were, then the KM900 Arena shows that the majors are finally catching up.
LG went further and put the same cube interface on a Windows phone (GM 730) at the event, leading to speculation that perhaps Windows was underneath the Arena after all, but Windows Mobile has been shown to run too slowly to respond to touch that well, and although none of the LG executives made it clear what operating system the new Arena is based on, we’re fairly sure that it is not Windows and that probably there is only a minimal executive, of LG design.
The Arena also comes with Dolby Mobile sound, a new introduction; 8GB of onboard memory expandable to 40 GB; a 5 Megapixel camera; full widescreen VGA screen resolution on a 3 inch screen (measured diagonally), and it calls the 3D cube its S-Class User Interface. The device can playback video on a TV screen, and supports both DivX and Xvid video formats and will be available in the third quarter of 2009.
We will always remember that Apple created the touch genre, but this launch signals the fact that none of the top handset vendors will rest until their product ranges have gone beyond it in features and function.