Orange San Diego

Available now
31st May 2012

We first got a glimpse of the Orange San Diego in February, when the handset was codenamed the Santa Clara. This is the first Intel powered Android smartphone to launch in Europe, so the San Diego is a little more important than your typical "own brand" carrier handset.

The single-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU promises to be very speedy, although we haven't seen any benchmarks yet, this is coupled with 16GB of flash memory, but we don't know how much RAM it has. On the front is a 4.03" display with an unspecified resolution (we think it is 600 x 1024 pixels), and on the back is an 8 megapixel camera featuring HD video recording and a burst mode capable of capturing 10 still shots in sequence. The press photos appear to show a front-facing camera as well.

The San Diego also supports HSPA+ high-speed data where available, and there is an HDMI port on the device too*. Of course, this is an Android smartphone so it supports GPS, WiFi, 3.5G, Bluetooth and everything else that you would expect.

Although the hardware looks promising, the operating system is Android 2.3 and not Android 4.0. In our view there is simply no excuse for launching a relatively high-end device such as the San Diego with the older operating system, and no upgrade path has been mentioned. If having Android 4.0 is important to you, then you should probably give this handset a wide berth until an upgrade actually appears.

In addition to the operating system, Orange have added their own applications, some of which are genuine enhancements (such as account management) but we suspect that there will be a great deal of "carrier crap" on the device as well.

One other key selling point of the Orange San Diego is the price. In the UK, this will retail for £199.99 for prepay customers (approximately €250), and will be free for contract customers on a £15.50/month plan and above. That's pretty good value for money for a smartphone such as this, and we suspect that the San Diego will be very popular as a result.

Orange say that the San Diego should be available in retail stores and online from 6th June onwards. We do not know about availability in other countries at the moment, although we would be surprised if Orange did not introduce this into other markets in addition to the UK.

* somewhere, according to the press release.