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Orange Stockholm Review: In Depth

Orange’s latest budget blower is the Stockholm, aimed at the PAYG market. Running Android 2.2 Froyo it shares the same shell as the Huawei U8160, also known as the Vodafone Smart. But how does this budget Smartphone fare?

What we like

Small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, the handset is light and convenient to carry. There are three Android buttons, along with a large central control you hold down to display open applications or press once to see an overview of all open homescreen.

Build quality is good though and feels more solid and slightly less plasticky than the Smart, connnections including a 3.5mm jack and micro USB for charging. Pleasingly for such a small handset you get WiFi and 3G. Orange supplies a 2GB card.

Running Android 2.2 you get the usual Android widget, along with an excellent selection from Orange linking to really useful extra features like the App Shop, Backup and Orange Wednesdays which is very useful for checking out cinema showing times. Another bonus is Signal Boost which (as the name suggest) boosts your signal by connecting to your home WiFi network.

Our favourite Orange feature is Gestures. Here you can can assess key features just by tracing a symbol, number or letter on the screen, assigning 27 in total. It works very well and is certainly quicker than delving into the menu system or poking tiny menu icons.

Although the screen is small browsing is a fairly painless experience on the Stockholm, mwhere you can take advantage of Android’s excellent text wrapping feature where text fits the space. Touch commands respond well.

Sound quality is a little tinny from the speaker, although it reaches a reasonable volume.

What we don’t like

Powered by a 538 Mhz processor, the Stockholm isn’t a sometimes a little slow, sometimes apps take time to load, Angry Birds is certainly a little juddery.

To access some Orange-centric such as Data Backup, features of the phone requires you disconnecting from your WiFi and using 3G.

At 2.8 inches the screen is rather pokey, it’s fine for browsing the internet, but typing is really difficult especially if you have large fingers. When commenting on Facebook photos it’s so small you can’t see what you are writing, so you have to turn the phone horizontally. At 320×240 the resolution is very low.

The Stockholm does include camera, 3.2-megapixels is about the resolution we’d expect at this price pointm, but the pictures are only good for a quick snapshot. The shutter is very show, it struggles with high-contrast situations and indoor shots have quite a lot of noise.


The Verdict

The Orange Stockholm will suit anyone looking for their first Android handset. It’s easy to use, small, with great connectivity and comes with some great extra features from Orange to differentiate it from the pack.

Our main gripe is the screen, which limits multimedia enjoyment, but for an Orange customer looking for a cheap well-featured smartphone it offers a lot for the money.
 

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