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The LG Arena is probably the best phone to be released in the first quarter of 2009. It's a compact touchscreen phone with a breathtaking screen, a fantastic new user-friendly interface, quality looks and a massive array of features: 5 megapixel camera with autofocus & flash, 3G video calling, music player with Dolby Mobile, FM radio, A-GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, FM transmitter, 3.5mm headphone jack. Oh, and we nearly forgot to mention the 8GB memory, expandable to 40GB! It really is a stunner!

What are LG on? They are churning out five-star touchscreen phones almost as quickly as all other manufacturers put together. For this reason, we are willing to forgive them for giving their latest touchscreen phone the same name as the former NEC in Birmingham, which is now called - you guessed it - the LG Arena!

How to review the LG Arena? It's a brilliant all-rounder. The list of things it doesn't do is shorter than the list of things that it does do, so here we go: it isn't a smartphone (LG have yet to enter the smartphone market (we nearly wrote "arena") and it doesn't have an 8 megapixel camera. That's all it doesn't do (it doesn't make the coffee or run you a bath either, but LG are rumoured to be working on this.)

So, regular readers of Mobile Phones UK will know that we lurve LG touchscreen phones. And we just lurve the Arena. Is it LG's best phone so far? Probably. It's a gorgeous phone to look at. It's quite a bit smaller than the iPhone 3G, which is a bonus, although this does mean that the screen is slightly smaller - but at 3 inches it's still a whopper. The brushed metal finish is lurvely too and radiates quality. But the best thing about the Arena becomes apparent when you turn it on: it's the drop-dead high resolution screen. With 480x800 pixels, it's a truly high definition display and is absolutely at the cutting edge. Readers of our sister website, RecommendedBuys UK, may know that LG LCD TV's consistently get the best ratings, and it's not surprising when you witness the quality of the Arena's display. The Arena is the first phone to showcase LG's new S-Class touchscreen user interface. Based on a "cube" idea, which you can see in the photo above, the screen contains a 3D cube that you can turn around to reveal one of 4 sides: contacts, widgets, shortcuts and a customisable home screen. It's kind of fun, but doesn't really add anything. But the touchscreen UI itself is first class. We've always been a fan of the LG touch phones, from the Prada to the Renoir, and the Arena is at least as good. Watch the youtube video below to learn more.

The Arena may not have an 8 megapixel camera (choose the LG Renoir KC910 for this) but it is a very well balanced multi-media device. The camera is 5 megapixels, with autofocus and an LED flash. It's clearly not in the same league as the 8 megapixel monsters such as the Renoir, Samsung i8510 or Sony Ericsson C905, but it's still a good camera. It records high quality video too, and you can use the front-mounted camera to make video calls. The music player can play all popular formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA, and supports Dolby Mobile for high fidelity virtual surround sound. A welcome addition is the 3.5mm headphone jack, which enables you to plug in any headphone with a standard connector. An FM radio is included too. The Arena also comes with a built-in FM transmitter, which enables you to play music wirelessly through a car or home stereo.

When it comes to memory, the Arena delivers the goods in abundance. Not only does it comes with 8GB of flash memory, but it also supports microSD cards up to 40GB. This dwarfs the memory capacity of even the iPhone! LG clearly are wanting users to make full use of all the multimedia functionality that the Arena is capable of, so whether you have a massive music collection, or want to watch full length movies on your phone in high definition, this phone is eager and willing to do the job.

There are so many features available, we can't cover everything in this review. We need to mention that the phone supports assisted GPS with geo-tagging of photos. We also need to mention that it's connectivity is outstanding - as well as the FM transmitter and 3.5mm headphone socket, it supports Bluetooth, USB and WiFi. It's a 3G phone with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps for rapid downloading of data, and it's equipped with an excellent web browser.

That's the end of our whirlwind tour of the LG Arena KM900! The touchscreen phone market is getting very crowded in 2009, and there are some brilliant phones competing for your attention, but we feel that the Arena is probably the best phone to be released in the first quarter of 2009, and we expect it to be a massive hit. Tech-heads will probably still prefer the Samsung Omnia or HTC Touch HD though.

Features of the LG Arena KM900 include:

• 5 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom, autofocus & LED flash
• Video recording (DivX playback)
• 3G video calling
• Touch sensitive screen: TFT LCD, 262k colours, 480 x 800 pixels (3 inches)
• Music player (MP3/AAC/AAC+/AAC++/WMA formats) with Dolby Mobile
• FM radio
• FM transmitter
• Assisted GPS with geo-tagging of photos
• Speakerphone
• Voice recording
• Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS, Email
• T9 predictive text
• Document viewer (TXT, PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS)
• Ringtones: 72 voice polyphonic ringtones / MP3 ringtones
• Wallpaper
• Java 2.0 games
• Phonebook (1000 names)
• Memory: 8 Gbyte plus microSD memory card (expandable to 32 GB)
• Connectivity: USB 2.0, Bluetooth 1.2, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone socket
• Internet: WAP 2.0, GPRS Class 12, EDGE, 3G HSDPA (7.2 Mb/s)
• Vibration alert
• Triband (GSM 900/1800/1900) plus 3G HSDPA
• Size: 106 x 55 x 12 mm
• Weight: 105g
• Talktime: 3.8 hours
• Battery standby: 300 hours