Orange crush
A mere five months after Vodafone launched its first own-brand Android phone, Orange has got with the program. The Orange-branded, Android 2.1 San Francisco will be available to buy for £99 this week, and is the first of a range of such phones to be offered by the mobile operator.
It seems to offer most of the basic features you would want from and Android phone: touch screen, camera, 3G, GPS, etc. It's made by Chinese phone-maker ZTE, but we don't know what the chip is. We can safely assume it's a relatively old one though, and the claimed talk time of four hours is nothing to write home about.
"The San Francisco is the first in a series of affordable Android devices we have planned for Orange," said Phil Roberson, director of devices at Orange. "Combining its great functionality with our pay as you go price plans, really does offer users tremendous value for money."
Orange recommends you combine the San Francisco with its Dolphin PAYG tariff, which offers ‘free' data capped at 100MB per month so long at you top up at least a tenner every month. With typical call charges being 20p per minute on this tariff, you only need to speak for less than an hour to reach that threshold, so it's pretty unlikely you won't be topping up.
In fact, that tariff calls into question the attractiveness of phones like this. You can get a much higher specced HTC Desire from Orange for the same upfront cost on a tariff that costs £22.50 per month and gives you 300 minutes and 500MB of data per month. Having said that it does tie you in for 2 years...
Here's the full published spec list, a piccie and a vid.
- Talk Time: 4 hours
- Standby Time: 9 days
- Weight: 130g
- Dimensions: 116 x 56.5 x 11.8
- Camera Features: 3 megapixel
- Connectivity: WiFi / Bluetooth / USB / SatNav
- Music: MP3 / FM Radio
- Network Band: Tri band
- Video: Messaging
- Memory: 150 MB internal / Up to 32gb Micro SD Card
- Email: POP3 / IMAP4
- Data Speed: 3G +
- Operating System: Android
- Version: Eclair v2.1
- Other: Orange WiFi, Your Account
- Applications and Features: Orange Maps, Orange Messenger by Windows Live, Orange App Store, Email, Orange Wednesdays
