That smiley is a must!
Well as much as I hate to go on about it, the white background wasn't removed, I brought up the issue of those smileys (which I hated for a long time) because of the NZ skin, which is why they were dropped. The problem here is because gif files don't have alpha transparencies, so they matte semi-transparent parts to a solid coloured background. If this solid colour is consistent, there is no problem, here we had a choice between offering a very different skin and a few badly designed smileys. A smiley that focuses on looking 3D and having shadows goes away from the original point of them, a small graphic to indicate mood. They are excessive for the purpose they serve to achieve.Yep, I resized (and removed the white background ) a bunch of these a while ago.