Cast your mind back to when mobile phones were used for making phone calls, texting and the odd game of Snake when you had no signal. Those phones didn’t have the power of today’s smartphones, but they had the benefit of being much smaller and lighter, especially before the advent of 3G.

Sony Ericsson’s Spiro harks back to those days; It’s a small device, with no 3G radio, a glossy fascia, matte back and a nice slide-out keypad lurking behind the 2.2in display. Its easy-access buttons are user-friendly and there’s no touch-sensitive pad at all. You’ll just find Call and End buttons on the front, along with four more controls and the Walkman media playback controller in the centre.

It’s quite a departure from the multitude of devices on the market trying to emulate the iPhone – and for that we like it. It’s not even pretending to be a smartphone – witness the lack of 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS. However, surprisingly it does have a 3.5mm audio jack, something that’s usually absent from Sony Ericsson handsets.

The Walkman media control gives away the fact that the Spiro is essentially a music handset – however, you’ll find little in the way of built-in memory (only 5MB, not even enough to store one track). However, a microSD slot will allow you to up that memory you’ve had to buy.

The camera’s not up to much either – it offers a miserly two megapixels. On the bright side, any shots you take will take some time to fill up your memory card.

The Spiro is not completely featureless, though. It has Bluetooth, which means you can play music or take calls wirelessly with the phone residing in your pocket. And you’ll also find that Sony Ericsson favourite, TrackID, which identifies songs for you by listening to them for a few seconds.

Mind you, you will need some sort of a connection for the phone to send the sound to its remote database.

Waiting game

The Spiro will let you surf the net, although the small display doesn’t lend itself to a totally thrilling experience, and it’s slow going because your fastest download speed is EDGE. You’ll find Twitter and Facebook apps, but again that slow speed will keep you waiting to find out what your friends are up to.

This may all sound somewhat negative, but while the Spiro may not have all the latest technological wizardry, it’s great value at around £40 pay-as-you-go. Despite its low price it looks pretty stylish, won’t weigh down your pocket, and makes a decent music player. If you consider that a 2GB iPod shuffle is the same price, and that you can add a 4GB memory card to the Spiro for a tenner, it suddenly starts to look like pretty good value as it also has phone capabilities, a camera, FM radio and so on.

Anyone who wants to send and receive emails will probably want a phone with a bigger display and faster connections speeds. But bear in mind that will mean carting around a larger, weightier phone – and spending more cash too.

The verdict

If you want a basic phone for making phone calls, texting and listening to music, the Sony Ericsson Spiro will do the job.