MOTOROLA MILESTONE REVIEW

The Motorola Milestone (or Droid in America) has a large, angular, industrial design that is unlike most other smart phones on the market.

Even with a first glance and feel, it looks like a Motorola that is keen to make a difference. Looks aside, the build is reassuringly solid and the slide-action is slick, nothing feels or appears to be plasticky or tacky about this device which can sometimes be the case, and has been in the past for Motorola - anyone remember the Dext?

Keyboard
First impressions would lead anyone to think the design is well thought-out, but on sliding out the left-sided QWERTY keyboard would make you think otherwise. The design is simply poor here in its awkwardness to use - you have to go over the D-pad to use the keyboard and once you're over it the keys are sticky and small - and makes text messaging little more than a chore. The lip at the bottom of the Milestone also makes the handset less ergonomic. But that said, this is one of the only downpoints to the Milestone.

Navigation
The capacitive touchscreen is a delight to use with multi-touch responsiveness that is lightning fast and makes navigation really quick - we presume navigational ease is also helped dramatically by its smooth Android 2.0 operating system. Motoblur allows simple integration with social networking sites and when scrolling the interface menu options are listed in tiles much like on an iPhone. However, we preferred the integration of HTC Sense with Android as on the new HTC Desire.

Display
The Milestone's TFT display is gorgeous too, packing a massive 16million colours, and for the most part when browsing web pages render quickly (for current standards) and flawlessly, although largely in landscape mode. Sometimes pages hung on 3G but this was most likely to do with the network, rather than phone. Still, WiFi worked best on the Milestone.

Apps
As the Motorola device uses Google's operating system it is unsurprsing to see a fair few widgets from the search engine giant, including a homescreen Google search engine and an advanced Google Maps app which allows layering... for example, Wikipedia Layers will show you when the nearest points of interest are, which we translated as the local pub. Of course there are now tonnes of apps to explore now with the increasing size of the Android app store that all will be compatible with all versions of Android (did you hear that, Windows?).

The Milestone is one of the best Motorola phones ever, and standing head and shoulders above many other smartphones, it maybe even one of the best phones of 2009 and I would highly suggest this as a smartphone, just don't use the keyboard.

QUICK-FIRE FEATURES
Display: 3.7" TFT touch-screen
Weight: 165g
Dimensions: 60 x 116 x 14mm
Battery life: 380 hours (standby)

Camera: 5 megapixel camera
Video: Video Recording (24fps)
Music player: MP3 / MPEG-4 / WAV / WMA / AAC
Ringtones: MP3 / AAC

Operating System: Android 2.0
Memory: 16gb MicroSD (MicroSD card slot - up to 32gb)
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0, aGPS, 3.5mm jack
Internet: Wi-Fi, Web Browser, supports Adobe Flash Player 10

RRP: £449.99
Release Date: December 2009

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