Orange Santa Clara Android phone with Intel power

 

Orange has announced a new smartphone that launches exclusively to its customers in the UK and France. The Orange Santa Clara is a high-performance Android phone and joins Orange’s portfolio of own-branded devices. It’s also the first Orange smartphone to feature Intel technology.

This smartphone is currently dubbed the Santa Clara and will launch in the summer where it will be given a different commercial name. The Santa Clara will run on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but there are plans to upgrade that to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich shortly after launch. It will include the Intel Atom Z2460 processor, and supports HSPA+ with Intel’s XMM 6260 platform. This will give fast browsing capability along with energy efficiency. The Santa Clara also features a 4.03-inch display with resolution of 600×1024, 16GB of memory and weighs in at 117g with dimensions of 123mm x 63mm x 9.99mm.

As well as this it also sports an 8-megapixel rear camera that can 10 pictures in under one second and also has 1080p HD video capture along with a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. Locally relevant Orange services will also feature on this phone including Orange TV, Orange Wednesdays, Your Orange, Orange Gestures, Daily Motion and for France only, Deezer.

Orange’s Senior Vice President of Mobile Multimedia and Devices Yves Maitre says, “For ten years, Orange has pioneered a successful own-branded approach to delivering to its customers high quality, affordable handsets in all price ranges, packed with locally relevant and unique services and features. We are delighted to be partnering with Intel to add such an exceptional device to our portfolio.” This article also tells how the Santa Clara will feature NFC support, Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, GPS, HDMI-out and media player and will be compatible with global GSM and 3G networks.

 

After all the talk, Intel has finally done it... it has launched a mobile phone with Orange and Gigabyte, with an Intel chip inside, and Pocket-lint has already gone hands-on with the new device.Built by Gigabyte and to be sold by the network in the UK this summer, the Orange Santa Clara will come initially with Android 2.3 Gingerbread but quickly get the upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, we've been told.
If the handset looks familiar, that's because it's almost the same design as the Smartphone Reference Design that Intel was showing at CES 2012.

Priced in the UK around the £20 - £30 per month marker, rather than jaw dropping flagship £50 pm plan, Orange hopes the phone will sit alongside past successes such as the Orange San Francisco models launched in 2011.In terms of the actual tech specs, the Orange Santa Clara uses the Intel Atom 1.6GHz Z2460 processor. It features a 4-inch display with a 1024 x 600 resolution, giving you a pixel density of 294.

For connectivity, you get mini HDMI and Micro-USB and on the wireless front it's well connected too. HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.1, AGPS, Wi-Fi b/g/n and NFC are all on board. Being an Orange handset, it also gives you HD Voice.Surprisingly for an own-brand handset, you get an 8-megapixel camera on the back with 1080p video capture and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front. It also features burst photo capture at 10fps for all those action moments.

There is plenty of internal storage at 16GB and one of Intel's claims for its smartphone chipset is that it will give you good battery performance - 14 days standby. Of course, how this turns into real-world usage we've yet to see. The phone measures 123 x 63 x 9.99mm and weighs 117g.

In the hand it is zippy, with Orange keen to show off features that it believes the Intel chip is good for. In the case of our demo that results in the test of a 360-degree video app that allows you to move around a panoramic video scene as it is playing. And the handset can also take 10 burst shots with the 8-megapixel camera in around one second.

While the HTC One X with its Tegra 3 quad-core processor from Nvidia and the HTC One S with its Qualcomm S4 processor can do both too, they are expected to be high-end and high-priced phones.The Orange Santa Clara is Intel's first foray into the world of smartphones, but judging by what we've seen so far, it looks like Nvidia, Qualcomm and others will have a challenger on their hands. Perhaps not today, but certainly in the future.