With Sony Ericsson recently announcing handsets that eschew the Walkman and CyberShot brand names, there are still plenty of recent handsets in both categories vying for your attention. One of the more alluring of the Walkman branded mobiles is the W705, a compact slider.

The phone has built-in Wi-Fi, something that is still quite a rarity in Sony Ericsson handsets. Then there is the fact that this is a 3G handset with HSDPA support and a front-facing camera for two-way video calling.

Something has had to give in order to make this phone meet its price point, though, and that something is GPS, which is not present here. The phone can geotag photos, but it does so by mast triangulation, so you aren't going to get much accuracy. If you must have GPS, look for the W715 from Vodafone. It has GPS but is otherwise the same as the W705.

At just 98g the W705 is easy to carry and it measures a pocket-friendly 95 x 48 x 14.3mm. It is a well designed slider and, while it has a surfeit of Walkman branding, the general look is attractive.

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Sony Ericsson has managed to make its front buttons and number pad very usable, which has not always been the case in the past. The flat number pad has slightly raised keys, making finding them at speed a doddle. On the front the smallish buttons are rendered easily ‘hittable' by making the Call and End buttons raised and surrounded by concave buttons top and bottom.

The screen is a reasonable size at 2.5 inches and its 320 x 240 pixels are up to Sony Ericsson's usual high standard. The screen is sharp and bright, and the accelerometer means it changes from wide to tall format as you turn the phone in your hand. We found that the screen was reasonably good for Web browsing, though if you are very keen on that activity you might find a larger screen more suitable.

The tediously predictable side-mounted chunky headset connector lets things down, and the bizarre shake control makes its usual unnecessary appearance. You hold down the top-mounted Walkman key and shake the handset left to right to move through tracks, shake up and down to change volume.

Music playback itself was unproblematic, though, with good quality sound and the usual high standard of software. There is an FM radio and the multimedia features also include the BBC iPlayer so you can watch live TV; and it works over Wi-Fi. There's a YouTube client too.

Memory runs to 120MB on board plus a 4GB Memory Stick Micro. The main camera is a bit of a let-down, being limited to 3.2 megapixels, but it shoots fair enough photos and there are some nifty image editing tools on board.

The W705 is a nicely built handset with some good features. If you need GPS or a great camera it might not be the mobile phone for you, but the W715 version at least solves the GPS problem.