Sony Ericsson Spiro

Sony Ericsson Spiro Price: $189.99

The Sony Ericsson Spiro is pretty easy to use, thanks to the fact that it’s far from being high spec and has a particularly useful keypad

The Spiro is a neat device new phone, with a nifty gloss front, flush display and an orange backlight to its matte keys

The Spiro is let down by the lack of 3G, which, among other factors, makes connectivity sluggish

It’s no surprise that with its small display and the omission of 3G and Wi-Fi, the battery lasts so long. It might be small but at least you won’t be rushing to charge it every night.

 Review and Specification for the Sony Ericsson Spiro

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.

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.

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.

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.