Orange Monte Carlo review

Of course the Orange Monte Carlo has HSDPA built in, and Wi-Fi too, so you can use either to get onto the internet. The 4.3-inch screen with its 480 x 800 pixel resolution makes looking at web pages a treat.

It's a bit annoying that the home page is Orange World, but it's easy to reset this to any page.

The TechRadar home page is a complex one for small smartphones, but it renders well on the large screen of the Orange Monte Carlo. Initial loading quickly gives you a readable screen that you can pan around, and it looks good in both portrait and landscape formats.

A double-tap zooms you out to a full page view, which in many instances will be just about readable.

Text reflowing is very good. If you use the small zoom buttons that appear at the bottom-right of the screen when you tap it, you can get in really close, with full text reflow in operation. However, pinching and zooming sadly doesn't yield the same results, so best to use buttons for reading text at your preferred size.

Or, of course, you can get to a more sensible text size for reading.

Despite having an 800MHz processor, the Orange Monte Carlo doesn't have Flash support. This is a big disappointment, because the large screen really does lend itself to watching streamed video embedded into web pages.

The YouTube client presents no problems, with content streaming really well and the large screen doing a great job.

Yes it's an LCD-TFT, so the colours can lack the vibrancy of an AMOLED screen, but it's perfectly viewable, if a little washed out.

We do, however, have to say that if you're outside the screen can become unreadable. And the brighter the sunlight, the more trouble you're in. It's a problem we came up against on more than one occasion.