Orange Monte Carlo

Editor's Review of the Monte Carlo

The Monte Carlo is the spiritual successor to the Orange San Francisco, a phone which arguably brought Android to the masses with its high-end features and wallet-friendly prices tag. Orange is promising to repeat history with its 2011 follow-up, but it looks like may have gone and done one better.

Design & Build

The Orange Monte Carlo - essentially a re-branded version of the ZTE Skate - is a gorgeous looking smartphone. At 125.9 x 67.8 x 10.4 mm it's relatively compact, and it's 10g lighter than its San Francisco sibling. It may be less weighty, but it manages to pack almost an extra inch of screen into its stylish black frame, which hoses a 4.3-inch (480 x 800) capacitive touch-panel. This may not come dressed in the AMOLED tech of the similarly sized Galaxy S2, but the screen is surprisingly bright and extremely crisp and detailed.

The screen may be fantastic, but the handset's 800MHz single-core chipset is by no means cutting edge. Saying that, we noticed very little lag when using the smartphone, and it proved noticeably speedier than its best-selling predecessor.

OS & Interface

Despite being detailed as a bargain-priced smartphone, the Monte Carlo runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) straight out of the box. With no custom UI onboard, you're provided with a vanilla Android interference, and although Orange has added a bunch of tweaks, this doesn't interfere with the all-round experience. In fact, we quite liked the network's additional touches, which includes Orange Mail, Wednesday and App Store widgets, as well as the network's 'Orange Gestures' support. This enables you to personalize the smartphone with your custom-made gestures - which can be used to unlock the smartphone or to fire up apps.

Multimedia & Storage

On the rear of the handset there's a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash - a huge improvement on the San Francisco's 3.15 megapixel effort which was disappointing lacking in flash. We're noticing a recurring theme with the bargain-priced Monte Carlo, as its back-end shooter also proved surprisingly impressive. Although there's a lack of dedicated camera key, there's no lag in between taking snapshots, and pictures come out extremely clear and detailed. Unfortunately there's no HD video, but the footage it produced was of a reasonable quality.

As an Android smartphone, you'll find all the usual multimedia goodies, too. There's a built-in music player, access to the App Store (Angry Birds looks impressive on the 4.3-inch screen), and up to 32GB of storage for all of your tunes. There's only 512MB of built-in memory though, so investing in a microSD card is a must.

Everything Else

The Orange Monte Carlo comes with Google's stock Android 2.3 browser, paired alongside HSDPA and WiFi connectivity. Browser performance was extremely slick, and thanks to the handset's 4.3-inch touchscreen, it was hard to tell the difference between a higher-end smartphone. Compared to the San Francisco, scrolling through web pages proved considerably smooth, as did multi-touch gestures such as 'pinching-and-zooming'.

Unfortunately, however, the Orange Monte Carlo doesn't yet support flash - which means it's unlikely to sway punters away from the Galaxy S2 or HTC Sensation. However, we've read that the handset could soon be getting Flash support - but there's no word as to when it'll be coming.

Conclusion

When we first got our hands on the Orange Monte Carlo, we weren't entirely convinced it could compete against last year's San Francisco flagship. However, we'd argue that the Monte Carlo could just be the best 'budget' Android yet - offering a stunning 4.3-inch screen, fast performance, and all the features you'd ever want from an Android smartphone.