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>> I'm Ken Sherman, senior editor at CNET.com. Today, we'll take a first look at the Sony Ericsson Z555a. This is an unlocked phone. It is available in North America. You just can't get it with other carrier but you can buy it and use it with either GSM, T-Mobile or AT&T. It is an unusual phone design, why? It has a diamond thing throughout. The front of the phone is sort of doubled and the individual facets and the diamond shapes that catch the light and reflect it at varying pattern. So, it's kinda cool. Also, it has a diamond-shaped camera lens, diamond-shaped speaker and even the bottom of the phone is angled like that. It is an attractive phone but one thing I did notice is the plastic on the front and back, feels just the tiniest but flimsy. The phone feels okay in the hands but definitely not the phone I wanna throw around. The external display is one of those hidden displays but it doesn't mean that when the backlight is off it is completely invisible. Not, a huge fan of that. I like to be able to see the time even when the backlighting is off which is common in most phones. You can always activate it again by flipping the volume rocker here on the side. Also, when the display is on, it is pretty small. It only shows the time, the battery life, the signal strength, and since the numbers are reflected into the outer skin, it is a little hard to see if you hold the phone at an angle. It's almost the letters look a little blurry. On the side, we just have the charger jack and here in this side we have the volume rocker. Open up the phone, internal display is fine. I found it a tiny bit small for the phone size. It felt like there is a lot of space here. It actually -- could expand this a little bit. But overall, it's not a bad display. One thing I did notice, that was depending on the theme that you use and there are several you can choose from, some of the icons in the main menu were a little hard to see. They sort of blend in with the background. Down in the navigation controls and buttons, I did like the design of these. They're flash and they're a little bit slippery but they have a good size, I thought. And you have the shortcut menus, plenty of shortcuts to get around without going to the menu. Keypad buttons are the same. Also, just a little slippery but pretty easy to use overall. This phone does have a unique feature that's called Gesture Control and we're used to some of the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones having that work. If you shake the phone, you can actually change the music track. This has a music panel but it's not really a Walkman phone that was so. What you can do is when you got a call or when the alarm is ringing, there's a little sensor that's down here and you can wave your hand over it [background tune] and you can silence the phone. In reality, it doesn't work that well. The speed of my hand didn't really seem to matter but you do wanna make it pretty close. I have to do it a couple of times and I know if I was in a meeting and I started waving my hand over my phone, I look a little weird. So, I definitely want to give that thing a try first. Other features include bluetooth, speaker phone, all the organizer features you might expect and of course, camera. I'm Ken Sherman and this is Sony Ericsson Z555a.
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