Good call
The main camera won’t keep the engineers at Sony Ericsson awake at night but it does its job well enough. The auto-focus is quick and accurate and pictures don’t look like they have been taken under some weird alien sun. Video can only be recorded up to 640 x 480, which is rather poor.
No Flash support, but at this price it's hardly a deal breaker
The SF2’s battery is 150mAh larger than the SF1’s at 1400mAh but you will still need to recharge every 36-odd hours as with every other Android smartphone under the sun. No problems to report with call quality or wireless connectivity, all of which worked a treat. The speaker is a bit boomy when turned up to 11 but there’s no want of raw volume.
As well as being available for £99 PAYG the SF2 is also available on contract as a single item and in a bundle with the new Orange Tahiti (Huawei MediaPad) 3G 7in Honeycomb tablet for £41 per month. That includes 2GB of cellular data to share between the two devices which seems a fair offer if you want to use the tablet to pick up the SF2’s Flash and Skype shortcomings.
Verdict
All in all the SF2 is not a bad reheat of a deservedly popular phone. The faster chip, more modern version of Android, better camera(s) and a body that looks and feels more expensive than the original but which costs the same are all welcome. On the down side there is too much bloat, too little system storage and no support for Flash or Skype video. ®
More Android Phone Reviews |
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Orange San Francisco 2
COMMENTS
Orange could have had the armv7 version of the same phone (With the same case even). They just chose not to for whatever reason. (Softbank Japan has that phone for sale already). You can swap out the msm7227(or MSM7227T) for MSM7227A with 100% software and pin compatibility. (Even extending to support of the legacy arm abi).
I am almost certain the choice was Orange's not ZTE's
head over to modaco for unlock info
http://android.modaco.com/forum/578-zte-crescent-crescentmodacocom/
I flashed a new ROM onto mine on day 1 & repartitioned it to allow for more app space.
I'm happily running an ARMv6 version of flash also, can't remember where I got it from now but likely on the modaco forum somewhere.
Oh but for an ARM7
Has ZTE bought the worlds stock of ARM6 processors? Would it be too much to ask for a 1GHz ARM7 then it really would be a cracking upgrade of the SF1.
iPlayer does 'work' on ARM6
iPlayer is filtered from the Market for ARM6 devices but it will happily sideload if you can find the APK. It works (for certain values of 'works') on our OSF so it should on OSF2 or any other ARM6 device.
...after trying it you may decide it was right to filter it from the Market. Even on minimum bandwidth it's struggling on the OSF and OSF2 is only a little faster.
A 1GHz ARM7 performance much better than 800Mhz ARM6+25%. A year ago the OSF was a good deal, times change, prices fall, specs improve and OSF2 now looks like a distinctly average phone for its price.
