Orange San Francisco II deals & review

As an Orange phone, the San Francisco II comes with the usual portfolio of Orange extras, including a pre-installed Orange Wednesdays app to help you acquire your free movie codes quickly and easily. Orange also give their customers a free iTunes movie rental every week. But you don’t need to be a film fan to appreciate all of this phone’s exclusive Orange features, because the handset also comes with a nifty service called ‘signal boosting’, or UMA. This lets users boost their signal in areas of low reception with WiFi – it’s not cheap, but peace of mind generally isn’t.

The San Francisco II loses the smooth, curved body of the original San Francisco, and instead opts for a more geometric finish, with streamlined buttons below the screen. It’s probably not to everyone’s taste, but it doesn’t look bad. It’s also slightly lighter than the SF I, at just 120g, which makes the phone feel a lot sleeker – even if the aesthetics don’t exactly help.

One of the most exciting features of the San Francisco II is HD Voice – currently an Orange exclusive – which means that in-call audio has a much higher quality. It isn’t that important, but it’s rare to see such a progressive feature on a budget phone. The SF II boasts a 5MP camera with flash, which is pretty good for phones at this price point – it’s the same as the camera on an HTC Wildfire, and over 1.5MP better than the cameras in both the Samsung Galaxy Apollo and LG Optimus Chat. The handset also has a very responsive 3.5” capacitive touch-screen display, which makes navigating the phone and browsing the web easy – a must for the majority of smartphone users. The phone also comes with the usual kit: GPS, a decent video player and FM radio.

The SF II improves on the original with an 800MHz processor, which is a whole 200MHz better than both the SF I and the LG Optimus Chat, and is more than enough to have apps and the web browser running smoothly. The handset’s 512MB of memory is pretty poor, but this can be boosted with a microSD card of up to 16GB, which should be plenty for the phone to function as an mp3 player. Supposedly the battery can deliver 4.5 hours of talk time; not great, but a modest improvement on the SF I.

One of the phone’s biggest improvements on its predecessor is that is isn’t cluttered by all the unnecessary Orange add-ons that troubled the first San Francisco. The phone is easy to navigate with the help of its ultra-responsive touch-screen, and users can select their apps from the ever-popular Android Marketplace.

You might catch the San Francisco II sitting next to its predecessor in Orange shops, which is still being sold at a similar price. The sequel is a much better bargain, with a better spec and a tidier interface to boot. Other popular budget Androids include the Samsung Galaxy Apollo and the HTC Wildfire S, while the LG Optimus Chat offers a physical QWERTY keyboard for a similar price. Ultimately, with similar specs, choosing between the best value budget phones at the moment is largely a matter of personal taste.