LG Arena or LG Viewty - which one is better? by Caroline Telford

To a large degree, comparing the LG Viewty and the LG Arena is like comparing apples and oranges. For starters, just look at when the two devices came out - the Viewty in October of 2007, the Arena in April of 2009. But on closer inspection, the differences between these two LG smartphones is not as great as you might expect for two devices released nearly 2 years apart.

Both phones are touchscreen smartphones, with the Viewty having a 3.0 inch TFT resistive touchscreen with 240 x 400 pixel resolution and 256,000 colors, and the Arena having a 3.0 inch TFT capacitative touchscreen with 480 x 800 pixel resolution and up to 16 million colors.

The user interface on the newer Arena is, predictably, superior to the Viewty's, an S-Class Touch UI as compared with a basic Flash UI. The Arena also has a built-in accelerometer, making a user able to switch between portrait and landscape view (standard and widescreen) by simply turning the phone, while the Viewty's UI has no such ability.

Both devices are HSDPA compatible and support 3G network speeds on AT&T's EDGE network. However, the Arena has a better 3G capacity, at 7.2 Mbps to the Viewty's 3.6 Mbps.

Both devices have the same basic call log memory for phonebook entries and dialed/received/missed calls - but beyond that, the LG Viewty has only 100 MB of internal memory to the LG Arena's 8 GB. And the microSD card slot on the Viewty only allows for 2 GB of expandable memory to the Arena's possible 16 GB. Those are huge differences in capacity, especially if you plan to use the phone as anything other than a phone (for example - as a music player, a video player, or for photo storage and sharing).

Neither device has an infrared port but both devices have a USB port (though the Viewty's is USB v2.0). Likewise both devices have Bluetooth with A2DP, but this time its the Arena's that excels, at v2.0 to the Viewty's v1.2. Only the Arena, however, has Wi-Fi - a dealbreaker to many would-be Viewty users.

Another mark against the Viewty in this contest is its lack of a GPS. The GPS built into the Arena, meanwhile, includes Google Maps and A-GPS support. The Arena's GPS also gives the device's digital camera geotagging capabilities, something the Viewty obviously can't do.

And speaking of taking pictures, interestingly enough, despite being almost 2 years apart in release date, both cameras have just about the same digital camera: a 5 megapixel camera with Schneider-Kreuznach optics capable of 2592?1944 pixels, as well as autofocus (the Viewty has a manual focus option too) and built-in flash (though the Viewty's is a Strobe flash and the Arena's an LED flash). Both devices also have video recording capabilities up to 30 frames per second with QVGA recording capabilities up to 120 frames per second. They also, incidentally, both have videocalling.

Also, as different as both devices are, they are both around the size size, with the Viewty at 103.5 mm x 54.4 mm x 14.8 mm, and the Arena at 105.9 mm x 55.3 mm x 12 mm. Despite such similar sizes, though, the Viewty is a quarter-ounce heavier at 112 g to the Arena's 105 g.

The bottom line is that the LG Arena, being newer than the LG Viewty, pretty much has everything the Viewty has and then some. But it's only natural that a newer product would have more to offer than an older one. At least one would hope so.