Mobile Network Comparison

The ZTE Blade, known as the Orange San Francisco was released in the UK on 21 September 2010, and has now sold over 80 million units and is available in over 30 different countries. In early 2011 the phone was reported to have sold more units than the iPhone 4.

So what made this such a good buy? And more importantly, will its sequel, the San Francisco II surpass the ZTE Blade’s standards?

Price

The first main point about the original San Francisco was that at only £99, it was a very affordable smartphone. The San Francisco II also offers the same price from the Orange store and comes with a free gift box including a pair of headphones worth £60. In our opinion, this is by far the best value PAYG handset currently available.

Storage

The original San Francisco came with 150MB internal storage, and an external 2GB SD card, with support of up to 32GB – perfect for listening to music and movies on the go. However, when it came to apps, not all applications and games allowed SD storage, meaning downloading a few apps could leave your internal storage full. And even when you could transfer all the data of an app to the SD card without help from other software, it seemed the phone struggled a little to process all that data, especially on ad-supported apps such as Angry Birds.

The San Francisco II offers an internal storage space of 512MB, with this space you can finally install applications without having to worry about running out of space. Not for a while at least anyway…

Battery

The battery life on the San Francisco II is slightly better than the original, offering an extra 24 hours standby time, and around an extra 30 minutes talk time. Not much improvement, but at just £99 you can’t expect much more.

Camera

The camera on the ZTE blade was horrendous, even at 3.2 megapixels. It camera had trouble capturing anything in low light, had no flash, and was very shaky when recording, even if you had a steady hand.

The San Francisco II boasts a 5 megapixel camera, with flash and auto focus, a major improvement from the first San Francisco. Hopefully making videos on here will be easier now we can actually see what we’re doing…

Software

First of all: the Orange branding. Yuck! I’ve got to say, the Orange branding on the San Francisco II isn’t as intrusive as the original, and still resembles the standard Android layout, with a stock Gingerbread 2.3.5 ROM. But we still feel the look isn’t as nice as some Android phones, and once again Orange has had to run their hands over a perfectly good operating system.

Round-up

Probably one of the reasons the first San Francisco sold so well was because it was very easy to customise, loading ROMs, unlocking etc. was very easy and there is lots of support forums all over the internet.

The San Francisco II is not so easy to unlock, unlocking with Orange costs £20, and unlocking for free is rather complicated, although it can be done there are a few mistakes that can be made so it’s best to read up what you need to before trying to unlock.

A good buying point for the ZTE Blade was that it was a good starter Android handset, at a budget price. Although the camera is improved, and now has a front facing camera too, if you have previously owned the San Francisco there isn’t much else new. The processor is still at 800Mhz even though this should be ample for most usage profiles.

So if you’re happy with an Android budget phone using the Orange network, this phone may be for you, but those Android enthusiasts who are into loading ROMs etc. You might not get as much as you did from the original San Francisco just yet.

However, overall there’s no denying that this is a significant upgrade in the hardware and the newer version of Android is also a huge bonus. Overall, if you’re looking for a budget smartphone on PAYG, you won’t do any better than this. In many ways, this is a better handset than much more expensive smartphones and with the power of Android, many will prefer it to the iPhone.

Click here to get the new San Francisco II for the great price of only £99 from Orange today.

Bad news for the New Year: Orange have recently announced that they are putting their prices up 4.34% from 8 January 2012. Now while 4.34% may not seem like much, if you are on a standard £30 monthly contract that’s already an extra £15.60 a year which definitely makes a difference.

These price increases come shortly after they increased their PAYG rates by up to 50%. Other greedy companies raising their prices this year have included ASDA Mobile, Giffgaff and Vodafone.

Cheekily, even if you have a fixed charge contractual agreement with Orange they are forcing the price increase on you and claiming you can’t get out of the remaining contract. They claim that their small print has allowed them to raise the price to any amount below the Retail Prices Index inflation figure without resulting in a break of contract. As the inflation rate according to the Retail Prices Index is 5.4%, they are marginally below. So even if you only signed up a couple of months ago, you along with millions of their other customers, are subject to this price increase.

We find these increases pretty abhorrent, especially as customers are already under financial pressure from rising energy, food and transport bills in these hard times. If you think that Orange are acting like Scrooge by making these charges around Christmas, you can definitely complain about it and possibly get out of your contract. Ofcom have recommended that customers challenge these price hikes directly with Orange. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, contact Ofcom directly and also make a complaint to the Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme.

Please also let us know how you get on if you’re with Orange and are trying to fight these charges.

An IT consulting and technology firm in Cambridge has managed to get a mobile network up and running on a Raspberry Pi board. PA Consulting Group has won numerous awards for its innovative projects before but the latest hack is probably the most impressive. They’ve managed to get a full-blown GSM cell base-station to run on the $25 computer.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board computer that is very low priced yet have power features and hardware and can run Linux. When it was first released earlier this year, it made headlines and quickly sold out many times over. It has a speedy ARM processor, a USB port, HDMI interface and was designed to help today’s youth learn to do proper computer programming.

It was invented by Cambridge University professors who also work in the area’s Silicon Fen tech industry and has proven to be massively popular for a variety of inventive applications. It’s sold not-for-profit and people have used it to make a physical drum kit out of vegetables, a high altitude balloon pretty much a do it yourself space probe) and a voice-controlled robot arm. It can even play Quake III.

However, this is the first time someone has managed to run a mobile phone network on the hardware. The idea was to show how you don’t always need expensive specialist hardware – sometimes, bulk-produced off the shelf solutions can be usable. This proof of concept demonstration shows that the cheap and minuscule computer can successfully do everything a base station needs to do such and route voice calls and text messages over a GSM network.

The method used open source software such as OpenBTS which implements the GSM mobile standard and FreeSWITCH which routes the traffic and interfaces the platform to the internet. It wasn’t that simple though, the engineers had to write their own routines in python then optimise the code for the Raspberry Pi. They also used a special radio interface to connect to the Raspberry Pi from the mobile phones. Check out this fascinating video for more:

What do you think? Is this just an interesting test or would it be possible to expand this to use in the real world? Are you tempted to get a Raspberry Pi or have you got one already? And what do you think the coolest thing someone’s done so far with these computers?