Orange Monte Carlo review

The Orange Monte Carlo joins the San Francisco in Orange’s own-brand range – like the San Francisco, it’s a rebranded ZTE handset. With a 4.3in screen and Android 2.3, however, it’s a far more advanced phone, and also comes with a 5-megapixel camera backed up by an LED flash. Despite these advanced features, it’s still relatively inexpensive, and can be picked up for only £150 on prepay.

While the large screen hints at a premium handset, once you pick it up you realise some corners have been cut. For a start, it’s quite a thick phone, but at the same time it’s surprisingly light. Reading the specifications more closely, you see where corners have been cut: the Wi-Fi doesn’t support the faster 802.11n standard, there’s only 512MB of internal storage, and the single-core processor runs at 800MHz, rather than the more common 1GHz.

Despite this, it feels snappy to use; the screen is bright and colourful, and the touchscreen interface feels responsive. The 480×800 resolution is great for browsing web pages, although more expensive phones with screens this size are more likely to use a qHD (540×960) resolution. The glossy black plastic design is fairly attractive, and the phone’s 120g weight offsets its bulk. We were glad to find hardware buttons for the Home, Menu and Back functions, although sadly you can’t use these to wake the screen up.

The Monte Carlo comes with an Orange colour scheme and branded apps, many of which duplicate the functions of standard Android apps. For example, there’s a contacts backup app, but Android’s own contacts app synchronises your contacts with Google’s servers automatically. There’s also Orange Maps, which we found unstable and is nowhere near as good as the built-in Google Maps. Orange Photo also refused to let us register, but thankfully we already have all our photos on Google’s own Picasa service, available from the Gallery.

When you open the Orange App Shop it turns off your Wi-Fi connection automatically, forcing you to use your data allowance to browse its apps – and to increase the chance you’ll use it, Orange has included three separate apps that point to it: the App Shop app itself, plus Games and Ringtones apps. Our advice is to leave it well alone, as Android’s Market has far more choice and variety. The Monte Carlo will let you use Orange’s Signal Boost technology, though, which helps if you get bad reception where you live by re-directing signals over your own Wi-Fi connection.

The Monte Carlo’s big screen is its main draw, but it does hide some inadequacies. First of all, app storage space is limited to 162MB, so even if you move as many apps as possible to the SD card, you will run out of space quite quickly. Secondly, battery life is poor, lasting only 15 hours in our light-usage test, so you’ll need to make sure you charge often. Lastly, we weren’t impressed by the camera; while snaps are OK for Facebook, videos are noisy and full of compression artefacts.

Still, at this price you can’t really complain: although the cheapest 18-month contract we could find is £25 per month, it’s a better idea to buy the Monte Carlo for £150 on prepay. You can even buy it SIM-free: search for “ZTE Skate” (the original manufacturer’s name) and you can find it for £216 with a stock Android installation – making an excellent budget smartphone without any Orange branding.