I've modelled a pretty decent mobile phone for my vis-com SAC and need it rendered but after three hours of tweaking I'm still running into problems with recreating my intended shades in Maya:

1. The body of the mobile phone is black and made of metal so I used a Blinn shader and set the RBG to 0,0,0 to make it all nice and dark, intending to rely on the specular to lighten it enough to make it visible. The problem is that it won't lighten up enough, meaning that I had to increase the intensity of the lights. This leads to my second problem.

2. I have little idea how to make a glass like material, so I used phong, set the colour to solid black and maxed out the transparency. The problem is that when it renders with high intensity lights, the material doesn't look much like glass, the whole mesh just turns out to be completely white. Also, I've noticed that once I get the transparency to show (so I can see the LCD screen underneath) the objects under the glass don't look sharper like they would in real life.

3. Setting up an ambient light, along with a directional light and two spotlights in the scene to illuminate the phone, the setup looks terrible, whole sections are either too bright, wrongly tinted or just not illuminated the right way (its hard to describe, it just looks bad). Can anyone please suggest the correct lighting setup? I'm aiming for the same kinda look in those PR photos.

So can anyone please suggest ways I can correct this? Thanks.