Sony Ericsson will this month ship its first true clamshell form-factor phone with a touch-sensitive main display. Dubbed the Z558, the handset will also feature character recognition ready for what the company called "one-touch" text messaging.

The Z558's touchscreen is a 220 x 176, 262,144-colour job. The phone also has a 128 x 36 colour sub-display. There's a 1.3 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom, and 18MB of on-board memory, expandable using Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards.

All the usual phone, messaging, email, music and games features are present and correct. The Z558i is a tri-band GSM/GPRS device, and it has Bluetooth 2.0 too.

Sony Ericsson is pitching the product primarily at Asian markets - in addition to English character recognition, the handset is also savvy with Thai, and there's a separate Chinese-language version, the Z558c. ®