We’ve suspected that Orange were planning a direct follow up to their hugely successful San Francisco (a.k.a. the ZTE Blade) Android phone since blurry images of the forthcoming handset leaked late last month, but so far Orange have remained silent on the subject. You still won’t find the new phone listed in Orange’s ‘Coming Soon’ section but we spotted what’s tantamount to confirmation on their official site this morning, in the form of an extensive Help & Support section for the “Orange San Francisco II”.
From the new Support pages we can gather almost everything we’d want to know about the Orange San Francisco II, including its full technical specifications and even some nice clear images. The physical design of the San Fran II is very much in keeping with that of its predecessor, with a few tweaks here and there. The screen’s the same 3.5” size, though TFT this time and not AMOLED like the first batches of the original SF, and has the same three hardware keys beneath it. Though it’s not mentioned on the spec sheet, we fancy we can see what might well be a front facing camera in the top right corner, too.
Internally, the San Francisco II’s also received a number tweaks and improvements. It’ll come packing the same 512 MB of internal memory as its predecessor, but has received an upgraded 800 MHz ARM 11 processor and the original 3.2 megapixel camera has been bumped up to a 5 megapixel offering. The San Francisco II will also run Android 2.3 Gingerbread out of the box.
Unfortunately, there are two things Orange’s Support pages don’t tell us about the new San Francisco – price and release date. Until we hear the official word we can only speculate, but given that the original San Francisco is one of the most popular budget Androids we think it’s fair to guess that the follow up will also be featuring a very wallet-friendly price tag. We’d also guess that Orange will be keen to get this device out in time for this year’s round of Christmas shopping. We’ll let you know when we hear more. In the meantime, check out some pictures of the new San Francisco II below!
Source: Orange
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