It sports a sleek, sliding design but is there any substance to this sexy mobile? Read our Australian review.This is the smallest phone we have seen since the Sony Ericsson T100. The T100 is longer than the SL55 but the latter is slightly thicker by a couple of millimetres. It measures in at a teeny 8.16 x 4.45 x 2.19 cm and weighs only 79 g. The SL55 is thickest near the top of the screen and the case tapers out smoothly to the edges. There is nothing square about this mobile, it is stylish and smartly curved fitting comfortably in the palm of your hand or pocket.
The SL55's sleek design is excellent. Its fashionable slider--touted by Siemens as a ProSlide-- retracts to reveal the keypad. The keys are bevelled and smooth and Siemens liken opening the slider to opening a treasure chest filled with rubies and black diamonds. It is no surprise then, that the case is coloured ruby red or titanium.
Editor's note: Only the titanium version is available in Australia.
Polyphonic ring tones can be assigned to caller groups, organiser alerts, the alarm clock and messages. You can also customise the sound the phone plays when the slider opens and closes. There are eight polyphonic tones in the ProSlide directory and more can be downloaded. Our favourite tone for this action is the default sound, which is reminiscent of the sliding doors from Star Trek.
Many functions are available with the slider closed. You can read text messages, play games and make phone calls without opening it. You can lock and unlock the phone while the slider is closed using a key combination or simply by just opening/closing the slider itself. Retracting the slider lights up the keypad making it easy to distinguish buttons in the dark while the raised keys help guide your fingers from one button to the next. Closing the slider ends a call.
Looks can only get you so far and we have a couple of minor gripes with the functionality of the SL55. The top row of buttons is very close to the upper sliding part, which poses a problem for some users.
Some of our readers wrote in to us in regards to connectivity issues with the S55, in particular Bluetooth technology. The German manufacturer has discarded this feature on the SL55, much to our surprise on a relatively new, high-end mobile. Infrared and GPRS are supported and we found it easy installing the Siemens Data Suite and connecting to the phone over IR.
The SL55 is MMS capable and comes with a couple of pictures pre-installed you can use as wallpaper, for screensavers or as logos. A snap-on camera and a serial port data cable came bundled with the S55 but Siemens has not included these with the SL55.
The address book on the phone stores up to a massive 500 entries. Many fields are included for each entry and it is straightforward assigning photos and groups to entries. For messaging fanatics, there is an expandable T9 dictionary, EMS and MMS support.
When in a medium to low RF coverage zone, we found that the SL55 frustratingly cuts out voice transmission while you're still able to hear callers voices. However, as long as you have 40 to 100 percent signal the audio quality is fine. Hands free mode is easily turned on during calls and produces adequate volume while the microphone picks up your voice well. Up to 20 voice commands can be recorded and a key on the side of the mobile can be pressed to activate pre-recorded functions.
Siemens has stuck to a intuitive menu structure similar to previous models. The operating system can seems slow to respond especially while loading games and during memory intensive applications. The games included are called Mobile Tennis and Rayman Golf--the latter being a cute, addictive game where you have a selection of 18 holes available.
We were disappointed with the older S55 model due to the meagre 256-colour screen. Siemens has bumped this up to a 4096-colour screen that supports seven lines of text on the SL55. At 101x80 pixels it's not the biggest screen we've seen and 56,000-colour screens, like on the LG5350, are still the most impressive.
Battery life is poor, yet not as bad as the power-hungry NEC e606; the SL55 averaged two days of normal usage before the power ran out.
All up, there is nothing revolutionary about the SL55 in terms of functionality. It is a fashionable phone and destined to be a sell out within this market. It is eye-catching, comfortable to use and the design is amazing.
Siemens SL55
Company: Siemens
Price: AU$899
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 665 366
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