Project JAL budget Android smartphone gets official as the Orange San Francisco

Vlad Bobleanta  By on 14 Sep 10

European operators have a thing for own-brand cheap Android smartphones. Or so it would seem, judging by recent moves. T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange have all announced budget devices under their own brands.

But perhaps the most intriguing has always been Orange’s Project JAL. We’ve heard of this first about two months ago, that it was going to materialize into a low-end Android handset to be sold by Orange across its European operations.

In the mean time Orange have launched another cheap Android smartphone in France, but it’s now clear that it was not the outcome of Project JAL.

Following the recent Orange naming scheme tradition, the Project JAL device will get a city name, and thus will be called Orange San Francisco. Its hardware is based on that of the ZTE Blade and it’s coming very soon.

If initial plans hadn’t been delayed, it would probably have already been available. But even so, it’s expected by the end of this quarter (meaning the end of September by my math).

The main specs of the San Francisco (in theory, identical to those of the ZTE Blade) are:

This should compete, on features and on price, with the ZTE Racer and the recently announced Huawei Ideos. The fight for the low-end of the Android smartphone space is definitely heating up.

Via Eurodroid

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