Motorola Milestone review

Reports of the death of Motorola proved to have been exaggerated when the bat wing boys burst back on to the scene with the really very good DEXT earlier this year. Now the Milestone looks like carrying the rebirth forward with a first outing for version 2.0 of Google's Android operating system, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, sat nav and a 5 megapixel camera.

Handset

It's a fair old handful at 60mm x 116mm x 14mm and 165g but the Motorola Milestone has easily one of the slimmest sliders we've seen. The weight is partly due to the metal casing, which at least ensures the Milestone feels sturdy and well built. At the bottom of the screen are four touch-sensitive buttons for back, menu, home and search. The lower part of the slide sticks out as a sort of protruding lower lip, and for the life of us, we haven't yet been able to figure out why. Around the sides are a volume rocker, a camera shutter button and a microSD power/sync slot, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and power/screen lock button on top.

Screen

The 3.7in capacitive touchscreen offers high-quality WVGA (480 x 854 pixels) resolution and looks terrifically bright and clear (so long as you take off the default brightness setting, which is on the dim side). It supports multi-touch, so you can do the iPhone-style pinch-to-zoom thing when you're looking at pictures or browsing the web and we generally found it to be every bit as sensitive as the iPhone when distinguishing between our brushes and presses.

QWERTY keyboard

The slide-out QWERTY keyboard offers four lines of keys (40 in all) plus a five-way D-pad. The keys are made of tactile rubberised plastic but we'd have liked them to have been slightly raised in the middle, which would make them easier to find under the thumbs. It's okay as it stands, but typing at speed can get a little tricky.

Operating system

The Android 2.0 adds a few welcome updates but there's nothing in the way of any killer apps. It retains the same widget-based UI, with three separate, fully customisable home pages, but the icons look a bit neater and sharper. The voice search icon that appears next to a text box when you press the search button worked very well, searching both handset and the web for whatever you suggest.

The unlocking system is a wee bit more sophisticated (you need to pull a wheel round in an arc, rather than just sliding downwards) and there's now support for camera functions like flash and digital zoom which we hadn't really missed, plus the onscreen keyboard's been improved a bit – not that you're likely to notice on a handset with a slide-out keyboard. There's now support for Microsoft Exchange email accounts though, which will put it on the A-list for many business users.

More features are likely to follow too. Facebook integration was promised, for instance, but we couldn't get it to work with the Facebook for Android app available on Android Marketplace. Motorola tells us the upgrade should be coming soon.

What looks unlikely to come is Motoblur, Moto's rather excellent social networking system that pulls together all your social networking updates and displays them on your home screen. We loved it on the DEXT, but Moto says it won't feature on the Milestone since it's considered to be more of a business-oriented handset. No, we didn't see the logic either.

Browser

Touch-to-zoom is a great asset for a browser, though you can also double-tap for quick zooming. The screen is nicely responsive and quick to render web pages either by HSDPA 3G or using broadband over Wi-Fi. The nippy 550MHz processor didn’t seem to have any problem handling multiple web pages and multitasking with other apps running in the background either.

Sat nav

The onboard A-GPS is supported by Google Maps of course, but there's also a 60-day trial of Motonav, which offers turn-by-turn sat nav directions. The maps are clear if a bit simplistic, and there's nothing like the wealth of additional data that's available with established sat nav names like TomTom and Garmin. If you like it though, a one-off payment of €80 makes it yours after the trial ends.

Camera

The 5-megapixel camera was a little bit of a disappointment given its decent spec sheet. It comes with auto focus, a dual LED flash, 4x digital zoom and a decent range of effects and modes accessible simply by flicking out from the left of the screen. It's fairly quick in operation too, starting up in a little under three seconds and taking snaps in the same length of time. It's just that the quality isn't terribly good. It struggles with light balance and is very quick to blur. Colours tend to look flat and if the light is less than perfect, noise is very quick to register.

Media

Watching movies on the large 3.7in screen is however a joy. It can handle MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264 files and we never noticed any tendency to lag. Music playback was good too, with WMP3, AAC, eAAC+, OGG and WAV files all supported and though the supplied headphones are no better than adequate, it's easy to upgrade them thanks to the 3.5mm jack and stereo Bluetooth for the wireless option. Usefully, the Milestone comes with an 8GB microSD card already on board, and you can add up to 32GB cards if you feel the need.

Battery

Battery life wasn't wasn’t bad on the Milestone. It gave up after about a day and a half of fairly intense usage – pretty much what we'd expect on a high-spec device like this.

Motorola seems to be going from strength to strength and usability is the key. It might have a high spec count, but the main thing is that, iPhone-like, the Milestone is really easy and even fun to use, with a beautifully sensitive touchscreen, intuitive features and apps, and that slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which is still pretty good, despite our niggle about the flat keys. The camera quality could be a little better, the sat nav may well improve with updates, but even out of the box, this is clearly a quality smart phone.