Orange San Francisco 2 review

Can Orange replicate the success of its budget San Francisco?

Orange San Francisco 2
Can the Orange San Francisco 2 live up to its predecessor, the king of low-cost Android smartphones?

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Orange san francisco 2

There's an FM radio on board the Orange San Francisco 2, and this has a rather nice look and feel that's certainly an improvement over that of the radio on the original Orange San Francisco.

There are 10 presets you can save on the main screen, and then you just jump between them with simple screen taps.

However, there's no auto tuning, no RDS and no way to edit channel information, so you can't rename the frequencies to remind yourself what channel each represents.

In addition, just as with the original Orange San Francisco, we couldn't find a way to play music through the loudspeaker. And the sleep timer from the original Orange San Francisco has gone, which is disappointing.

The music player is basic to the point of boredom. Oh, it plays tunes reasonably well, and can manage playlists, shuffle tracks and set tunes as ringtones.

But it didn't manage to pick up album art from the SD card on which our sample music sat, and there's no equaliser for you to fiddle with sound quality.

Orange san francisco 2 review

Orange provides a reasonably good pair of headphones, although they are the flat in-ear type that are often the least comfortable to wear. There's an inline pause button on the headphones, but no forward or back option.

The handset speaker has high volume, but crank it up and the sound quality breaks up rather too much for our tastes.

Video playback support runs to MP4, H.264 and H.263, and we were pleasantly surprised at the way the handset coped with our samples. Playback wasn't jerky, colour rendition was good, if a little on the dark side, and sound quality, provided we didn't push the speaker to full volume, was fine.

If you want more video, there's the standard Android YouTube client on offer.

It's nice that Orange provides a 2GB microSD card, particularly since right out of the box our review sample was only able to offer 130MB of storage.

You might guess from this that media playback isn't a high priority for this phone, but at least there's no faffing to get music on and off the handset. It drops into USB storage mode nicely, and you can just drag and drop files across to your computer.