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Not everyone wants a phone that plays music and takes photos, and not everyone wants a phone on a contract. Some people simply want a basic mobile suited to voice calls and a little bit more; want to use their phone only occasionally; and want to keep their payments down by going Pay As You Go.

It is for such people that Nokia makes handsets like its entry level 1200, and if you are prepared to pay 15p a minute for the first five minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles on the same network and 5p after that, 35p a minute to those on other networks, 3p for texts to others on the same network and 10p for texts off network, then Virgin Mobile is the place to go for the Nokia 1200.

There really is no other word to use to describe this mobile than ‘basic'. The hardware design and the features are all precisely that. So go into this review with your eyes wide open on that front and you'll get along with it fine.

What we have here is a small mobile phone which should fit into most pockets without causing a fuss. It is a bit fat at 17.5mm, but quite short at 102mm and pretty thin at 44mm. It's also light at just 77g.

I get the impression that the physical design of this handset has been set so as not to faze the prospective user, who I judge to be as not too technologically savvy or keen to become so.

With that in mind the basic black and grey colour scheme is conservative, and the simple and minimalist button layout offers the bare basics of what a mobile phone is for. There are no side buttons at all.

The phone charges via Nokia's small pinned mains adaptor and the jack for that, plus a 2.5mm headset socket, sit on the bottom edge of the phone. There is no headset provided with the mobile, though. All you get in its tiny box is the phone itself, the battery, charger and a user guide. Even that last item was missing from my review sample, so I can't tell you whether it is printed or on CD - though I'd guess the former given the low-tech target user group for this mobile.