In a nutshell: The best features of the Spiro are its Walkman player and FM radio. Other than that, it doesn't offer a lot, and is probably best avoided.
The most popular phones may all be touchscreen smartphones, but not everyone can splash out that kind of money on a mobile. Besides, if all you need to do is make calls, send texts, listen to music and connect to your mates on Facebook, you can do all that for under fifty quid. And so the Sony Ericsson Spiro could possibly be your next phone. It does all the aforementioned, plus it has Bluetooth, a basic camera and is cute and compact into the bargain.
The trouble is, Sony Ericsson have cut rather a lot of corners to fit the pocket-sized Spiro into a pocket-sized budget. While we're not expecting GPS or Wi-Fi at this price level, we are, frankly, hoping for more memory and triband operation at least. The memory in particular, at just 5 MB, is pitiful, making a microSD memory card an essential purchase and therefore inflating the price.

There's one thing that the Spiro does well (in addition to making calls and sending texts), and that's play music. With a Walkman 4.0 player, an FM radio with RDS, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, there's nothing to complain about at all. Apart from the lack of memory, which we've already complained about.

The other thing that the Spiro does is access Facebook and Twitter. But it doesn't do these well. With no 3G to provide fast internet access, and just a tiny little screen available, you'd be better off forgetting about these features. Forget the web browser too - it's rubbish.

And we mustn't forget to factor in the fact that half the claimed features don't work reliably and the phone has a tendency to keep breaking down.

We can't recommend the Spiro. Although it's cheap, it still doesn't work very well as a basic phone.