LG isn’t exactly shy about pushing the envelope. We’ve had 8-megapixels in two handsets from the company, one of them, the KC780 squarely focussed on the mid-range. And now we have the LG Arena with its 3D user interface.

Yes, we know. Suggesting you can get 3D on a flat surface is a bit like suggesting the recession will be over next Tuesday. You might wish for it, but you know it can’t really be true.

3D interface aside, the Arena KM900, which will soon be available from Orange for free on contracts, is quite a looker and is brimming with features. The handset is small and light at 106x55x12mm and 106g. Our review sample had a silver titanium backplate and silver outer front frame, surrounding a black frame to the tempered glass finish of the screen.

Its front screen measures 3-inches across diagonal corners and delivers a sharp 480x800 pixels. With a top-mounted 3.5mm headset jack it is ideal as a pocket-based music player. There are no awkward pocket-snags from a side-mounted headset connector.

And with 8GB of built in memory and an SDHC card slot lying under the backplate you can bump up the memory nicely. Dolby Mobile helps with the quality of sound output though we didn’t find it as great as we’d anticipated. The music player has plenty of equaliser presets, though sadly it has no room for user defined settings.

Music is one thing you’ll want to store on this phone, both for personal listening and for sharing via the built in FM transmitter. But the storage capacity matters for more than just music as the LG Arena plays both DivX and Xvid video. You’ll need to store those movies somewhere, eh?

There’s Wi-Fi built in so you can hop onto your own network for a bit of fast data access, and HSDPA running at speeds up to 7.2Mbps for when you are out and about. If you are wondering how the phone handles web browsing the news is good. An accelerometer helps with flipping into wide screen format, and you can pinch to zoom in and out of pages as well as drag them round the screen to view all their content. We found the phone wasn’t the snappiest at rebuilding zoomed pages, but its pace was something we could live with.

GPS is built in too. Apart from using this with mapping tools such as the built in Google Maps (here along with Gmail, YouTube and Blogger, incidentally), you can geotag photos.

The main camera shoots at 5 megapixels and its LED flash helps it out indoors though we found shots taken inside were a bit grainy. The macro mode was superb, though, capturing plenty of detail. There is autofocus, face tracking, and a continuous shot mode which takes five photos.

Video shooting is D1 (DVD quality) capable at 30fps and the handset has TV-out capability. It is galling, given this, that LG doesn’t supply a TV-out cable with the phone.

OK, we have to get to that 3D user interface now. It is primarily about the cube and the carousel.

The cube can be called up by pressing one of the three touch buttons under the screen. The other two buttons are the Call and End/back buttons. Hit the button and the screen you are on fades away to offer a dice-like graphic which sits centre screen. Finger sweep and you move between four of its faces labelled Shortcut, Multimedia, Contacts and Widget. Tap one of these and it explodes to full screen.

Now, its animations might be nice but you don’t need to use the cube at all. You can finger sweep through any of the Shortcut, Multimedia, Contacts and Widget screens to get to the next one. And the graphics that are shown on the cube faces don’t actually represent what you see on the full screens. You can, for example, populate the Widget screen with a selection of applications, a calculator, weather reports, notes, and clock, but whatever you choose the face on the Cube always shows the same shortcuts.

Multimedia appears in a pair of vertical carousels letting you flick between photos in one column and music tracks in the other. A similar carousel is presented for your contacts. It is very easy to sweep around and find what you want.

If you want to get to the full handset menu there is a touch button actually on screen. This sorts applications into four groups – communication, multimedia, utilities and settings. Four icons are shown at once with the screen in tall format, eight when it is in wide format. If there are any more to see you can scroll with a fingersweep.

Generally the Arena is very responsive, doing our bidding as we sweeped and tapped without making us wait for it. The little vibrations, almost too small to notice, are a nice confirmation that you’ve made contact with the screen, too.

And there is lots to like about the visual design of the user interface. One example we like is the dial in the camera software that looks like those you find on real cameras and which you sweep to rotate for making settings. Another is the wheel-like button you sweep in the FM transmitter to choose your broadcast frequency.

Slimline hardware, good software design, ease of use and plenty of features combine to make this a very desirable mobile phone. It’s a shame the 3D aspect is overhyped by LG, though.