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Orange Tahiti hands-on
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Orange is the first British phone network to offer its own tablet. The Orange Tahiti is a budget Android Honeycomb tablet that comes with an Orange contract, for free with an Orange San Francisco 2 phone and two-year contract.
It’s a 7-inch tablet, putting it in competition with the Samsung Galaxy Tab rather than the 9-inch Apple iPad. At 7 inches, the Tahiti will fit in a jacket pocket or handbag — or even in a back pocket, as long as you don’t sit down.
Almost certainly named for David Essex’s musical language lessons, the tropical tablet weighs 390g. Inside there’s a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G, with a 5-megapixel camera on the back.
As it runs Google’s Android software, you can download apps from the Android App Market to customise your tablet. Built-in apps from Orange include the Orange Wednesday app for free midweek cinema tickets.
The Tahiti is powered by Android version 3, Honeycomb, the version of Android specifically designed for tablets, although not the very latest, perhaps because its innards aren’t quite up to the task of running Ice Cream Sandwich.
Orange is quite keen on sticking its logo on affordable Android devices to tempt folks into contracts, like the popular Orange San Francisco, Rio and Monte Carlo phones. Orange’s partner T-Mobile does the same with phones, but this is the first time we can think of that a network has offered an own-brand tablet.
The Orange Tahiti launches this week and costs £70 with a two-year, £25 monthly contract. That includes 1GB of data to use any time you like, and 1GB of off-peak data to use during the day. This ‘quiet time’ is between midnight and 4pm.
Or you can get the Tahiti free-ti with the Orange San Francisco 2 Android phone for £41 per month, netting you 2GB of data — which can be used by either the phone or the tablet — over a two-year contract.
Would you sign up to a phone network for two whole years to bag a cheap tablet, or is the Tahiti not worth signing your life away? Tell us your totally tropical thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
