Review
Overview
The Orange Lisbon is the handset for those who want a touchscreen phone on a budget. With a music player, camera and internet access, it has features that you would expect from a more expensive handset, as well as covering the basics of calling, texting and organising very well.
The homescreen on the Lisbon even has the look of a high spec model, with shortcuts to useful functions that look like apps, and the ability to change the order they are in to make them suit your taste. The Lisbon allows plenty of customisation, both on screen and through a choice of colour for the back cover, as well as personalised ringtones and Ringtagz.
With the dual navigation of the resistive touchscreen and the silver navigation button, you will soon find your way easily through around the Orange Lisbon interface, and can decide which is your favourite way to get around the phone.
We give this handset an admirable 7/10 for being so well suited to the budget touchscreen market. Read on to our in-depth review of the Orange Lisbon.
What’s in the box
The cover of the orange Lisbon box looks promising: “get personal” – so we can expect to make the Lisbon feel like our own. Take a look at our video of Unboxing the Lisbon to get a taste of what it all looks like.
Included in the box:
- The handset with a black cover already on
- Wall charger
- USB connector
- Earphones (doubles as a hands-free set)
- Battery
- Two other interchangeable covers (in pink and orange)
- Orange Lisbon user guides
We particularly like the interchangeable covers – they are bright and bound to attract attention (and a great help if you drop your phone in the dark!). They just snap on and off, nice and easy, so you can change them as often as you feel like. The battery is pretty easy to pop in too, just make sure you put the SIM in first or else you’ll get an annoying “insert SIM” message when you turn your phone on!
You can use the USB connector to charge the Lisbon via your computer, and also to access the storage on the Lisbon. Whilst the internal memory is quite restrictive, there is a microSD slot in the back of the phone, which supports up to 8GB of additional memory (you can pick up an 8GB microSD for around £11). This is a handy amount for music and photo storage, and means you won’t have to be too disciplined about uploading your photos from the Lisbon to your PC. However, if you prefer listening to your tunes on an iPod, and don’t tend to snap away too often, you won’t miss having that extra storage, and is probably not worth the extra cost.
Look and feel
It’s light. Very light. Almost a bit too feather-light, truth be told, as it sometimes jumps right out of your hand if you’re a bit careless (which we never are. Honest). On the plus side, the Lisbon is robust enough to survive the knocks and rattles of everyday use, so you won’t be forced to shell out for a protective cover.
As we have mentioned, the additional orange and pink covers are a great way to brighten up the phone! However, they only cover the back half, and there’s no way to make the front section more colourful. Most of the front is taken up by the resistive touchscreen, and then there are the two call buttons and the large middle access key surrounded by an eye-catching silver direction pad. You can find the volume rocker on the left hand side of the Lisbon as you look at it, and the headphone dock on top. It’s 3.5mm, the standard size, so you can use your own headphones for an overall better sound experience.
The Look of the homescreen
At a not-too-shabby 2.6”, the touchscreen is nicely sized to display great pictures and animations as both a background and screensaver. The ones pre-loaded are all cat themed, with a few nice animations so your screen will feel dynamic. If felines aren’t your thing, you can always use your own photos, or browse the Orange website from your phone for some cool ones available to download for free! If you choose to get your Orange Lisbon on the Canary tariff, you will have free access to even more free downloads!
The features that you are likely to use the most frequently are all bundled together on the left side of the homescreen. These are:
- Task organiser
- Call history
- Messages
- Contacts
- Camera (including launching image and video viewer)
- Orange World
You can rearrange the order that these fall in although, bizarrely, the task organiser has to stay at the top, and Orange World has to stay at the bottom. Why? We don’t know. Ask Orange. You’ll probably want to put the “Contact” option near the top, as it has a neat feature to allow you to set VIP contacts – a bit like a speed dial on a traditional phone.
Access the menu from the homescreen by touching the “menu” button on the bottom right. When you open the menu, the Lisbon gives off a tiny vibration to show that you have successfully clicked in the correct place. Great for accuracy, this means that the type of pressure needed for the touchscreen on the Lisbon will soon become second nature to you.
The organisation of the menu is a little strange, for example, grouping the music player away from the FM radio, but on the whole it is understandable and easy to navigate around. Want to find out more? Read about all the menus on the Orange Lisbon in the Orange Lisbon User Guide
Usability
At this kind of price range, you can’t expect a touchscreen that will instantly respond at the merest hint of a touch – its resistive screen means that you will have to give it a reasonable prod to get the screen to respond. That said, we found the touch screen easy to operate if you’ve got the fingernails to do so, and the touchscreen navigation is nicely complemented by the silver navigation button, so there is an alternative for tricky things like scrolling when on the internet.
If you are a bit of a biter and have no fingernails, it may be worth considering investing in a stylus like the ones you can get for a Nintendo DS. This way you can get full use from your touchscreen, improving your accuracy for typing and browsing. You can pick them up very cheaply if you know where to look- get 3 for a penny on Amazon!
Texting
When texting, the Lisbon gives a micro-vibration every time you tap one of the keys. Great for accuracy, this helps the overall texting experience. You can either use predictive text, or opt for the multi-tap input option. At first we were horrified by the predictive text, but after some perseverance found that it was much faster than multi-tap input, and infinitely easier once you have got used to the resistive touchscreen.
Calling
To dial, simply press the phone icon at the bottom centre of the touchscreen, and input your numbers, then press the green “call” key. Thankfully, you can also save numbers that you have typed in, rather than having to re-enter them in the address book (plenty of cheap handsets don’t have this feature, for reasons that we can’t understand). Again, the Lisbon does a handy micro-vibrate each time you have successfully input a number, so you won’t find yourself outraged when you have incorrectly missed off the “0” at the beginning of your friend’s number!
We called a few of our friends on the Lisbon, and found nothing to fault with the sound quality. We experienced no unexpected crackles or pops, and we suspect that the Lisbon will be pretty reliable that way even in the much longer term. It is a little clunky to use the touchscreen to select options when in an automated call over the phone, but we reckon this is excusable.
Features
We have picked some of the features that we really like in the Orange Lisbon, a few things that represent great value for money and a few that stand out as pretty unique.
Firstly, the camera. The vast majority of phones that you can get on the market these days will have one, and the Orange Lisbon is no different. It is a 1.2MP camera, with video recording and playback. Whilst the photos it takes are great for capturing a funny moment with your friends, the Lisbon is great because you can choose whether to take the picture in portrait or landscape- so when the photo is saved, you don’t have to mess around trying to rotate it!
The multimedia capabilities of the phone are good overall. The music player looks quite sophisticated, and displays a cool picture in the background when you are playing your music. You can create your own playlists to add to the phone so that you can listen to whatever you want to, or listen to FM radio so someone else can decide!
The only game that comes preloaded is a game called sushi. Whether or not you like sushi the raw fish, you are sure to find sushi the game addictive! Of course you can download your favourite ones from the Orange Website by accessing Orange World.
Browsing the web is straightforward, with access directly from your homescreen. It uses WAP connectivity, so is a little slower than what you are used to on a PC for example, but does the job, and is great for looking something up whilst on the go. A great resource available on the Lisbon is Orange Local, which uses your location to tell you what is around you. You can search for a cinema, a supermarket… pretty much anything, really, and all straight from your homescreen. That is something you wouldn’t expect from a pay as you go phone!
The best feature is the fact that you can set your phone to turn off and back on again at scheduled times. For those of us who often forget to turn our phone onto silent before going into the classroom or into work, this can save a lot of embarrassment when a less-than-cool ringtone starts blasting out from your bag at an awkward moment.
Final thoughts
The Orange Lisbon is without doubt excellent value for money. Sitting right at the budget end of the spectrum, you nonetheless get excellent value: a touchscreen phone with capacity to browse the internet at the touch of a button, a camera and camcorder, music player and great tariff deals meaning that you get a lot more freebies than you would for a cheap phone on contract.
We think that if you are after a touchscreen phone on a tight budget, you can’t go wrong with the Orange Lisbon. It has some impressive features, including Orange Local, a good multimedia player and diverse ways to personalise it to your taste. For texts and calls you will be well equipped with pay as you go freebies from Orange, and with the dual control screen and navigation button, you will find the Lisbon very easy to use.
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