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Fly Mobile isn't a mobile phone manufacturer I have toyed with at TrustedReviews before, but you may have noticed that we've recently upped the number of phone reviews and that gives me a chance to break away from the usual suspects and look at a few less mainstream brands. In this instance it has allowed me to squeeze in a handset I've wanted to look at for a little while - the SLT100 from Fly.

This handset is only available on Virgin Mobile prepay and you have to go to The Link, Currys or Argos for it. If that doesn't faze you then you'll be getting your hands on something quite different from the norm.

Touchscreens are normally the domain of smartphones such as handsets running Windows Mobile or UIQ. The SLT100 doesn't boast either of those operating systems under its hood, and it isn't a smartphone. Nor does it have a smartphone price tag. But it does have a touchscreen. This provides you with touch access to contacts, the device main menu, on screen number dialler, Bluetooth, camera, FM radio and music playback.

Sometimes the touch-icons are pretty small, but if you find you can't hit them accurately then a stylus lives on the top-right back edge of the phone. The stylus itself fights rather tightly into its housing and so extracting and refitting it was a fiddle - a shame as the build quality of this handset is pretty good.

It is not all touchscreen access. Beneath the screen on the front fascia are two softmenu buttons and Call and End buttons. They look like touch controls themselves, but thankfully they are real buttons.

In between them is a large, dark grey navigation button with central select button. When you are on the main screen the four points of the navigation button take you to the FM radio, audio player, Bluetooth and camera, doubling up some of the touch features on the main screen. Press the central select button and you're in the handset's browser.

The SLT100 is a slider, so its physical number pad is hidden away till you need it. The sliding mechanism is a little tricky to use, especially one-handed. There is no ridge on the front fascia to push against, so you are left either pushing against the screen and making it grubby or using the below-screen area and hitting a button you don't mean to.

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