Orange San Francisco

The San Francisco is comfortably the ultimate handset for the Android buyer on a budget. 

Setting a new benchmark for the budget Android brigade

 

Pros

► Great screen

► Super build quality

► Can ditch the Orange skin    

 

Cons

► Average stills camera

► Duff video camera

► Poor FM radio 



 The San Francisco is an Android-toting handset pitched at the lower end of the market. At £S9 on pay as you go, it's comparable with handsets like the ZTE Racer, Vodafone 845 and T-Mobile Pulse Mini.

All these lower cost Android phones are obviously compromised in comparison with their high-end counterparts. The real question, then isn't how they stand up to all other Android phones, but how they stand up to each other.

With Android 2.1, Wi-Fi, 3PS, and 3G in th© mix, the feature set is compelling, and the 3.5in 480 x 800-pixel touch screen suggests great things in terms of visuals.

For a budget handset, the build is lovely. The chassis feels very solid, its slate grey main colour is appealing and the sliver highlights on the long edges look reasonably cool, though of course they're plastic and not metal.
 


Button bashers

There's a row of very small buttons under the screen providing access to the Android Home, Menu and Back functions. If you want to do a search you can slap the Google search box widget on the Home screen.

A 3.5mm headset connector sits on the top edge along with a teeny on/off button, while the left edge houses a mini-USB connector and the right is home to a pair of volume buttons. Minimal it may be, but that's all you need really given that the touchscreen is available for any feature that you absolutely must have immediately to hand.

There are some budget handsets that let Android down. They don't shew off the operating system in a good light and tend to turn potential buyers away.

The San Francisco is different and certainly doesn't suffer from this problem. Yes, it only has a 600MHz processor at its core, which is far from the fastest, but it didn't falter at the first hurdle, coped well with video playback and only really stumbled when we asked it to do a lot of stuff at once.

Orange has quite clearly come up trumps where it really matters, offering good build quality and an excellent screen considering the generally good price.