After the 2.8″ Vodafone 845, the UK is getting yet another low-cost Android phone, this time it’s the San Francisco from Orange UK, sold for £99 (= $153, consider the UK has a 20% VAT tax that is not paid for such products when sold in the USA), at this affordable price on a month-to-month pre-paid usage plan. It might actually have a 3.5″ capacitive WVGA 800×480 touch screen, but maybe a low cost one. It comes with the Google Marketplace, which probably means it has all the Bluetooth, WiFi, Compass, A-GPS, back-facing camera, accelerometer and all the other features required for Google Marketplace to come pre-installed. As more and more of these low cost Android phones become available, such as also the Kyocera Zio M6000, no more 2-year $2000 contracts are going to be required to buy cheap Android smart phones! I expect Android’s market share will increase even faster once these low cost pre-paid Android phones start to become available everywhere.
Update: It appears that this phone is based on the ZTE Blade design. Source, specs sheet (Thanks, Cesar Cardoso). Update 2: a comment is saying it has a Qualcomm MSM7227 ARM11 45nm 600mhz processor (same as these phones, same as HTC Legend and Sony Ericsson X10 Mini among others, same SoC as in the Foxconn 7″ Android tablet reference design that I filmed here and here) with the AMD z430 GPU, same GPU as in the Nexus One/HTC Desire. The screen might actually be 3.5″ Capacitive WVGA AMOLED type! (thanks, Hackingthelacking)
Found via: androidguys.com
