Orange Monte Carlo review

We mentioned in the Interface section of this review that Orange pre-installs some apps of its own on the Monte Carlo, which provide similar functions to the Android ones. The same can be said of both maps and apps.

This can make for quite some confusion, and we really wish Orange would leave well alone with its own extras and let Android do the talking.

On the maps front you've got Google Maps and Orange Maps. They provide similar functions, but Google maps is much more feature rich, entirely free, and we'd stick with that.

Orange seems to have gone mad with apps. As well as its own such as Orange Wednesdays and Orange Photo for uploading to online storage, there are some games including good old Tetris and The Sims 3.

There are also some other productivity-style apps including Documents to Go for viewing – but not editing – Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF documents, a useful file manager, stopwatch, and a nice Note Pad app.

Orange also has its own app market, and there are widgets on the menu screen linking to what it calls the App shop, Games store, and Ringtones store. Thanks Orange, but this makes the menu section rather cluttered.

Moreover, there's a memory issue. The Orange Monte Carlo comes with 512MB of storage memory. When we checked our review handset there was just 118MB free for your own apps – not enough if you want to download the average amount of Market frippery – we suspect you'll be moving a fair few applications to memory card.