The first release they made was the ever-popular Bay area model, which lead how for budget smartphones. Now, they have got came up with Barcelona model, a cool, fun phone containing strong similarities to it’s namesake, but do you find it enough to pull us off the high-tech releases from the more professional on the cellphone market?

On first glance the phone can be quite stylish and sleek, weighing a small 115g and being incredibly thin and pocket friendly at the mere 9.9mm deep – this truly is really a supermodel regarding smartphones. The circular four-way controller and solid menu, home, zoom and back keys, in addition to your standard call buttons, makes for easy control and a overall efficient appearance.

The phone carries a black full QWERTY keyboard and appears rather just like the Orange’s Rio I and Rio II releases, as well as an aura of BlackBerry over it. The 2 main.6 inch touchscreen is of your decent size and is particularly incredibly crisp and clear, so viewing movies and web surfing is an exhilarating experience. We’d have to say it knocks the socks from the HTC ChaCha and Necessities.

Overall the quality of sound is pleasing and also the inclusion of HD Voice permits enhanced quality voice calls, something we definitely noticed, regardless of whether in a very noisy setting. Also you can make video calls, that is something on the novelty inside of a phone around this end with the price scale.

We were pleased with the connectivity options, that include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HSDPA, together with the UMA Signal Boost technology, which we felt was a bit of a copycat from the BlackBerry priorities. Use this technology by pairing it together with your Wireless router that connects towards the network via Wi-Fi in an effort to enhance your signal to generate and receiving calls – clever huh?

We weren’t enthused after we discovered the Barcelona was running the Android 2.2 Froyo operating system rather than the Gingerbread OS, but we were past that whenever we realised how great it absolutely was to perform within the phone. The Android Marketplace store has plenty it is possible to download to increase the Barcelona experience, including games, apps along with other widgets that can help you in work or play.

We were also regrettably disappointed while using the camera on the Barcelona. We’re so used to the standard phone camera dimensions of nowadays to generally be 5 megapixels, and so the idea that the Barcelona only sports a 3.2 megapixel camera is amazingly frustrating. That isn’t to talk about the photographs are poor, they’re a decent quality in bright outdoor light and you may shoot videos, but when you compare your snaps for your friend’s HTC Wildfire ones, you most likely are left feeling slightly red faced.

Released Summer 2011, it’s not long to hold back for your new Orange Barcelona. We’d give you advice to trust carefully relating to this one, as although this is a great phone in the great price, your camera is poor in comparison with other equally priced phones plus some of your features, such as the operating-system, might be out-dated before you are ready with an upgrade. But overall we’re feeling it’s actually a pretty decent phone for that price and now we love it’s sleek looks.