Best Orange phones

Orange aims to tempt you to use its network by offering price plans named after adorable animals, but it's also home to an excellent choice of phones.

As well as stocking many of the hottest smart phones, Orange often serves up cheap pay as you go blowers under its own brand, such as the Orange San Francisco. The best thing about Orange's own phones is undoubtedly the price. They often offer smart-phone features or fully fledged Android at a relatively low cost.

We've made sure to include some of these cheap choices in our pick of the best Orange phones, as shown below.

Orange offers some good deals, but its website can be horrifically hard to use. It's worth your while to use a comparison site, such as Billmonitor, to make sure that the network offers the best deal for you before investing.

You should also take a look at the Orange coverage checker to make sure that you'll get a good signal where you live and work.

If you do decide to switch to Orange, you'll benefit from two-for-one cinema tickets and meal deals at Pizza Express, thanks to Orange Wednesdays. There's also a special section for Orange customers on the Vouchercloud coupon app.

When it comes to customer service, Orange makes us blue. A customer satisfaction survey by Which? magazine ranked the network near the bottom of the pile for contract and pay as you go customers. 

Orange does better in Ofcom's data, though, sitting around the middle of the pack for customer complaints.

As of 2010, Orange and T-Mobile are part of the same company, but the two networks remain separate, offering different phone deals. The good news is that, if you're on Orange and run out of bars, you can jump onto T-Mobile's network. The downside is that you'll only be able to use T-Mobile's 2G band, which means slower-than-usual Web surfing.

For a 3G connection, you must be on Orange's network. You can tell which network you're using by looking at the name displayed near the signal bars on your phone's screen.