Orange Monte Carlo review

Can Orange's new low-cost Android handset match the San Francisco?

Orange Monte Carlo
The definitive Orange Monte Carlo review

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We've already looked at the YouTube capabilities of the Orange Monte Carlo, and there's plenty more on offer, in the shape of an FM radio and music playback.

Orange monte carlo

You've also got MediaShare for Wi-Fi sharing of video, audio and images. This worked well when we used it over our home Wi-Fi connection, and we happily streamed music from our main computer to the Orange Monte Carlo.

The music player on board is the standard Android offering, with no connected options such as lyrics download. It failed to pick up album art from our SD card, but the controls are obvious enough with large and easy to press buttons.

Orange monte carlo

There's one control that does look a bit different, though, and this turns Dolby Mobile sound enhancement on and off. It does actually make quite a difference when listening to music through the Orange Monte Carlo speaker, improving the quality considerably compared to the standard settings.

There weren't any headphones with our review handset, but when we used a mid-range set of our own we still found the output to be quite fuzzy, even with the Dolby Mobile sound system turned on.

Dolby Mobile includes an equaliser that has a small effect on sound quality, but this isn't a handset you'll want to choose if you like really good-quality music playback.

Orange monte carlo

The FM radio on the Orange Monte Carlo is rather poorly featured. It doesn't seem to have auto seek and store, so that you have to run through frequencies to find stations manually. Then you drag these frequencies from a box at the top of the screen onto an area beneath, where they're saved.

There's no RDS, and you can't rename frequencies to represent station names. It's a poor show.

Orange monte carlo

Video playback is a better story. Videos are picked up from the Android Gallery and from a separate Video app. If you choose the latter it'll list all the videos on the handset ready for playing. However, be warned it only supports MP4 and H.264 video formats. AVI, DivX, WMV and Xvid need not apply.

Our MP4s played fine, but we've mentioned throughout this review, the LCD TFT doesn't offer the most vibrant of screens and in sunlight it's extremely difficult to see the screen.