Because of non-negligible ISI due to the Gaussian filter and delay spread in the GSM system, an equalizer is required. In this letter, a joint sliding window channel estimation and timing adjustment method is proposed for maximum likelihood sequence equalizer. And also a smoothing algorithm is presented in order to improve the equalizer performance. This smoothing scheme utilizes a variant of LMS algorithm to tune the channel coefficient estimates. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is adequate for channel estimation of the adaptive equalizer.