Orange San Diego One Week On

So a week later I still have the Orange San Diego

After loading it up with apps I can confirm that the initial ‘insane’ boot times has now just become a normal boot time, disappointing as this was one of the main selling points in the press conference

Battery is holding its own at the moment, pretty impressive screen time compared to the Galaxy Nexus which is sups the battery in comparison. It’s still really too early to tell as you probably all know it takes several weeks to be able to judge the battery life, standby time is still pretty impressive though

 

 

Like I mentioned in the first 24 hrs with the device the lip where the screen ends and goes into the sides of the device just sucks up all the dirt from the screen and gets it stuck in there so after prolonged usage you’ll have a nice tidemark of grime you will need to scrape out of there with a card or some such utility. Saying that though the gap between the screen and bezel on my Galaxy Nexus is bigger and the dirt buildup is minor so maybe I’m just being critical

Screen is still really sharp, but like I said before not the best viewing angles and it can be a bit awkward precisely selecting things in the touch screen, I still have trouble tapping in my pin correctly to unlock it

The best feature of this phone is the way it feels in your hand, it must be the rubberised back and the slim feeling of it in hand just makes it really nice to hold

The camera in my opinion is ok, I’ve used a lot worse it has the cool burst feature where you can take up to 10 shots in a second, I found that if you wanted to take lots of pictures it was best not to have this feature on as after taking the shot [ten of them] you’re prompted to select which ones you want to keep, you can just select to keep them all to take your next shot but I found it a bit clunky taking a picture, looking at them all selecting ok then back to the camera but thats just my personal preference. I’m sure this is how the burst feature on new phone such as the SGSIII works also. The shutter speed is reasonable and of course it has the hardware button to use but it’s not connected to the screen lock in any way so if you want to take a picture quickly you will need to unlock the phone first then select the camera

Hackability is always a big contributing factor for me when buying a phone and if this is a big factor for you then prepare to be disappointed, the Orange San Diego hacking wise is locked down tight with what appears to be a locked bootloader and no other viable attack vector for exploits, this plus the fact that there are no real development tools available for the platform means that at the moment gaining root access and things like custom recoveries and roms are not possible

I think Orange/Intel have really missed a trick here as I know most of the community that will be looking at this phone as a viable option will only really commit once it can be rooted