Orange San Diego review: Intel comes to smartphones

As I alluded to previously, the San Diego is a doppelgänger for the Intel Medfield reference design that we saw at CES: the devices’ general dimensions and spec sheets are virtually identical, and only a few minor cosmetic differences separate the two.

Orange has stuck so closely to Intel’s formula that the San Diego feels almost anonymous. Manufactured by Gigabyte — a big player in the PC parts industry and a logical partner for Intel — there’s nothing particularly offensive about the San Diego, but there’s very little to pique your interest either. It’s just a black and silver slab, with predictable lines and unappealing curves. I’ve had more than one person tell me "it looks like a toy," and that’s not because of poor build quality or even (for the most part at least) poor materials. It’s just so generic it’s almost unreal — no surprise given its origins as an Intel testbed.

Up front is a 4.03-inch WSVGA (1024 x 600 pixel) display, which is a very unusual size and resolution for a smartphone, and the first clue that this isn’t your average Android device. Beneath the display there’s a line of four capacitive keys, and up top there’s a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera capable of shooting 720p video.

The sides of the device are clad in a very cheap silver plastic, which is reminiscent of the sort that used to cover the old HTC smartphones of the mid 2000s. While I owned and loved many of the old Windows Mobile handsets, their build quality is not something I’m nostalgic about.

I’m sorry to say that the imperfect real-world performance hinted at in the browser test extends to the rest of the software suite. Orange’s interpretation of Android, which features on many of its low-end smartphones, has one of the worst skins I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. Among the highlights are ugly icons, compressed text menus, and a collection of utterly dull (if occasionally useful) widgets. You’ll come across occasional stutters when navigating the UI, especially when swiping through homescreens — that’s completely unacceptable from a device that seems to be this powerful.

To ensure that the performance was down to poor software, rather than the Atom, I installed the third-party ssLauncher. Immediately after switching away from Orange’s launcher, all of the San Diego’s performance issues were eradicated. While I can now sleep happy knowing that the processor was not to blame, that’s not much consolation to the average person that will buy this phone and get a thoroughly sub-par experience.

In addition to the sluggish launcher, Orange has littered the San Diego with a number of preinstalled, non-removable apps. The full list comprises 10 apps; although I’ve seen phones ship with more bloatware, there are five separate programs dedicated to carrier services, and very few of actual use. Navigon Select was actually of some interest to me, as it offers turn-by-turn directions without the need for a data connection, but unfortunately unless you’re on a plan that includes the service, you’ll have to pay £5 (around $7.75) per month to use it. Dailymotion and Quickoffice are both inoffensive, but if I wanted to I could get them, or any number of alternative apps, from Google Play. They certainly shouldn’t be unremovable. Gestures is an app that only works when you use Orange’s awful launcher, and allows you to trace shapes on the homescreen to open up an app, start a new text message, or jump to a settings menu. While it’s a nice idea, in reality I found it trying to recognize a gesture when I was simply attempting to swipe between homescreens — more of a hindrance than a help. Doubletwist is admittedly a fantastic media player, but again, I don’t like that it can’t be removed.

Measuring 4.03 inches diagonally, the San Diego’s LCD is dwarfed by modern-day ‘superphones’ like the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III. After spending quite some time with a 4-inch device recently, I’ve fallen in love with this out-of-vogue screen size. The resolution certainly helps — WSVGA (1024 x 600 pixels) on a screen this small gives a thoroughly dense 295ppi. That falls short of the industry-leading Xperia S (342ppi) and iPhone 4S (326ppi), but I find it impossible to make out pixels anyway. It’s definitely a cut above mid-range devices like the HTC One S (256ppi), and holds its own against the Xperia P’s superb 275ppi display.

However, pixel density is but one metric when ascertaining display quality. There are also the small matters of color temperature, saturation, viewing angles, brightness, black levels, and visibility in sunlight. To totally nail it — and in turn earn a hallowed ‘10’ in our wrap-up — a display has to be well above average in every category. With that in mind, how was my experience with the San Diego’s screen? Good, but not perfect.

Although viewing angles are indeed superb, the display doesn’t ‘pop’ like the HTC One X or iPhone 4’s LCD, which are laminated to glass. The backlight is very bright, and makes this LCD one of the more visible in direct sunlight. Viewed head-on the San Diego produces black levels that are among the best I’ve seen, but from a somewhat-oblique (45 degrees or so) angle, the backlight washes out all the colors and reduces the visible contrast. Speaking of colors, they’re nicely saturated and reasonably accurate, but the white balance (and therefore color temperature) seems to be a little on the blue side. It’s nothing major, and unless you’re the sort of person that obsesses over display calibration you probably won’t notice.

Sitting at the back of the San Diego is an 8-megapixel f/2.4 auto-focusing camera with a dizzying array of features, including a burst mode that can shoot 10 images at up to 15fps. It’s also capable of shooting 1080p video at 30fps, and encodes it in H.264 at 15Mbps. Up front you’ll find a sensor that can capture stills at 1.3-megapixels and video at 720p.

The photos I took were extremely inconsistent. It’s usually easy to pinpoint issues and highlight poor low-light performance, soft images, or issues with exposure, but to this day I still have no idea why some images were either ridiculously dark, under-saturated or over-exposed. I’m almost certain that the sensor isn’t to blame. On occasion (and seemingly at random) it outperformed the Sony Xperia P, iPhone 4S, and Galaxy S II. But those occasions were few and far between. As far as I can tell, the sensor is fantastic and can capture a great amount of detail, even in extremely low-light situations.

The software doesn’t help matters at all. It’s more like a tech demo for the image processor built into the Medfield chip, and was clearly created by an engineer rather than a UI designer. That’s to say, the feature list is very extensive, but the way the app presents the features to you makes no sense. Switching between sensors and photo / video modes is done through two tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen which sit too close to each other — you’ll often find yourself changing cameras when you wanted to switch to video mode and vice versa. On the left side of the display is a pull-out drawer with an almost-endless scrollable list of meaningless buttons, inside which are sometimes more buttons, which will take you to a set of toggles.

Buried in the sea of icons are the usual ISO, exposure and white balance controls, but also such exotic options as backlight correction and antibanding, the latter of which prevents those unsightly lines that appear when you take photos of a television or computer screen. If only everything wasn’t so difficult to find. To give you an idea of what joy awaits you inside the submenus, the smiley face button contains three toggles: XNR, ANR, and GDC. There is, of course, no mention of what the heck any of the settings do anywhere on the device or in the included manual. After searching around around a little I managed to deconstruct the acronyms: Geometric Distortion Correction, eXtra Noise Reduction, and Active Noise Reduction. The fact that the software is capable of this sort of witchcraft is fantastic, but it should either be taken care of automatically or be clearly labelled. That’s the story through this UI — way too many settings than are needed for a smartphone, and very few of which are actually defined properly or explained.

I actually appreciate having more granular control over my photos — iOS’s over-simplified setup thoroughly frustrates me when compared to the average Android camera app — but this is absolute overkill. It doesn’t invite experimentation either, as there are far too many options that under the wrong conditions will completely ruin your photos. Intel has placed a reset button at the bottom of the menu, so once you mess up the settings — and unless you’re a camera pro, you will — you can quickly jump back to your original settings.

Shooting video was far easier, and the results were much more impressive as well. The settings list actually fits on the screen now, although still presents you with confusing, unexplained acronyms in the form of DVS (Digital Video Stabilization) and NR (Noise Reduction). The other settings pertain to video size, white balance, flash mode, zoom, and the obligatory selection of filters. The movies I shot were crisp and detailed, although occasionally the autofocus flitters around a bit (as seen in the video sample below). Low-light performance was good, and the video stabilization also did a good job of reducing shakes.

The San Diego’s front-facing camera deserves a little praise. It performed quite well in comparison to most front-facing cameras — which admittedly isn’t saying much — but it did give me photos and videos I wouldn’t be completely ashamed of. Given its placement you’ll likely be using it for video calling most of the time, and i’m happy to report that it performed very well over multiple Skype calls.