You may well be forgiven if you've never heard of Fly, they're not exactly in the same league as Nokia or Samsung, but despite or maybe because of this they have managed to produce a surprisingly good little handset with the SLT100.
Currently only available on Virgin the SLT100 is a sliding touchscreen device, which launched at an amazing price point of ?49.99. Whilst touchscreen phones are quite common now, one at this price bracket is quite a revelation.
The screen is 240x320 pixels and looks good enough, there is a stylus packed into the top of the phone which allows fairly responsive input. The only bug-bear we had was that the handwriting recognition feature is quirky to say the least, meaning that I ended up just using the keypad whenever we wanted to type messages; a shame but again look at the price. Images are clear and the screen outputs a respectable 262k colours.
What is also surprising is that the phone is actually quite small, measuring 96 x 49 x 14.9mm. The finish and build quality is good and overall the handset is fairly pleasant to look at, hold and use. The keypad is comfortable, as is the circular d-pad and the usability is only let down by the menu interface, which is a little too basic for my taste, only displaying three icons at a time.
You wouldn't expect a huge range of features in a mobile phone at this price, so again I was very pleasantly surprised, when I discovered that in addition to being tri-band and supporting microSD expandable memory, the phone also had an FM radio and a 2 megapixel camera! Okay, so 2 megapixels is nothing special now, but again, when you consider the price, it's actually very impressive. The picture quality isn't exquisite, but it is more than acceptable. Going back to the radio, I was very intrigued to find that the handset actually allows you to record FM radio directly to the memory card. I'm not certain but I think this might be a first for a phone, even the high-end Walkman phones only record enough information to identify the track online and then it's lost again, it takes me back to the good old days of tape recording songs from the radio, trying to stop before the DJ interrupted (Does that make me sound old?).
Overall I am very impressed by the handset, admittedly it is not the greatest phone in the world and does not stand up to the likes of some of it's 2 megapixel counterparts (e.g. the fantastic Sony-Ericsson K750i), however at the price point on pre-pay, the phone is incredible value for money and would make a great gift or phone for the kids. Oh and just in case you don't like pink, it's also available in black.