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With Mobile World Conference upon us in Barcelona, there’s bound to be plenty of amazing cell phones being shown off.  While there is no new iPhone to be found, there are a few phones that have the potential to level the playing field in terms of what a cell phone can do.  One example would be the new LG’s new flagship phone, the Arena.

Looking at the Arena, it seems to take a few clues from other touchscreen phones that try to compete with the iPhone.  But, the user interface, LG’s new 3D S-Class User Interface, is what sets it apart.  Think of it as somewhere like the iPhone interface with Compiz effects and you’re almost there.  It certainly looks impressive in the demos, and should run well given its powered by a “powerful AMD processor.”  There doesn’t look to be anything resembling multi-touch that could cause legal issues, but there doesn’t seem to be much need for it in the GUI.

Of course, if the only difference was the GUI it would be a rather boring phone, but LG packed a lot of interesting features into the Arena.  To start, it’s the first phone with Dolby Mobile sound, which claims to provide some sort of surround sound and should provide excellent media playback.  There’s a 5 MP phone built in with autofocus, continuous shot and the ability to take 120 fps video that should look great on the 3 inch WVGA display, as will DivX and Xvid videos.  There’s even an FM transmitter for listening to your music in the car.  There’s no point without storage, and it has 8 GB on board, and can go up to 40 GB with the micro SD slot.

There’s also Wi-Fi, A-GPS, 3G HSDPA 7.2 and a Google Mobile package in the phone, but that’s almost to be expected.  The phone looks promising from a number of standpoints, assuming the GUI holds up well.  It’s hard to say how it will stand up to the iPhone and its App Store, but as far as the phone itself goes, the Arena looks to have the iPhone beat in all but the multi-touch.  Hey, maybe it’ll even be able to send an MMS every so often.

Read [LG Arena]