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Full Review

23 February 2006 - After struggling with a gaggle of Paul McCartney references we’ve plumped with the never ageing-one’s Back To The Egg. That’s exactly what the revamped Siemens/Benq brand has done, returning to the former highlight of its range the delectably delicious egg-shaped SL55 for its spanky new SL75. Due to our natural discretion we will try to avoid mentioning the disappointingly overweight SL65.

This finish is smooth and glossy on our virgin white sample, (it’s also available in a more moody black or silver) and the size and look are both spot on. In fact, the SL75 not only wears its style credentials in its sleeve, but it also does so in a really smart, limited edition bespoke leather case, designed by luxury-leather-goods-supplier-to-extremely-posh-people Aspinal of London (£60).

But this mobile not only looks great, it feels amazing in the hand too - although if you have mitts like sides of beef we wouldn’t recommend it. The two halves of the sliding mechanism join up with a reassuringly solid click that was missing on the original, and although light, it’s weighty enough to inspire confidence in the build quality. The 262k colour screen is small, but perfectly formed, and if we have a gripe about the construction is that the buttons are too tightly packed for effective text messaging or dialling - so make sure your contacts are kept up to date. It also has email functionality, but it’s a pain to input anything longer than a basic missive, so beware.

Internally things have certainly kept apace with current trends, and this handset has a surprisingly impressive array of features for such a compact style phone. There are all manner of useful offerings including a passable 1.3 megapixel snapper, Bluetooth connectivity and even an MP3 player backed up with 52MB of internal memory - sadly there’s no way to add to this via cards.

Verdict

This updated egg phone goo goo g'joob g'goo goo … pretty good, actually. Okay, so it's a bit of a girl's phone but here's nothing wrong with that.

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