Speaking at a launch party for its new KM900 Arena touchscreen handset, LG's boss man Ahn Seung Kwon revealed the company's plans to launch its own native application store.

The Arena picked up a Pocket Gamer Gold Award recently, and given that LG managed to gather up nine per cent of the global mobile market in 2008, a centralised location for its hardware's applications and games is no bad thing.

"The key thing to success for smartphones depends on content," says LG's CeO. "In line with the perception, LG will open 'LG App Store' in July to share contents for mobile applications."

As he was speaking at a conference in Seoul, it's unclear whether the LG App Store will be available globally from the outset, or whether this is to remain native to Korea for the time being. We suspect the latter.

Still, on-device application stores are becoming increasingly vital to a manufacturer's survival, and what with the Arena performing so well it's reassuring to see LG facturing software into its plans to achieve second place (behind Nokia) in the global mobile market.