Review: Motorola Milestone smartphone

The Motorola Milestone offers a similar feature set to the firm's previous touch-screen Dext smartphone, with its slide-out Qwerty keyboard and social media functionality, but supports a sleeker overall appearance.

As with the Dext, the Milestone also runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is the first to use the latest iteration, Android 2.0. This latest update to Android looks and feels much like any other vanilla deployment with its three customisable home screens. However, there have been some improvements to a few key areas.

These fall into the realms of native Microsoft Exchange support, a better user interface and browser experience, along with a much improved virtual keyboard. The latter is almost a bit of a moot point with physical keyboards, but the browser's 'pinch to zoom' plus full HTML viewing works much better than on other phones.

The zoom feature was left out of the US Droid version of the mobile, and the Google turn-by-turn navigation software has been replaced by Motorola's own sat nav in the European model. The plus side to this is that no other phone has the Google mapping software either, so what we don't know we won't miss. Also all the Motorola maps are based on the phone and they're not pulled down over the air.

One item missing from the Milestone that was first seen on the Dext is Motoblur, which is an overlay to the Android OS much the same way as the Sense is on HTC Android mobiles. Besides expanding the number of screens available for widgets, there's an in-built engine for displaying social networking updates on the home screen.

Security features
Motoblur also offers great security for the handset, making it possible to track the mobile's every movement through Google Maps, along with being able to back up all the phone's contents into the cloud. If the phone is lost or stolen, the handset can be remotely wiped of all data and the content restored to a new mobile.

Other features that were available on the Dext but not the Milestone are the phone book's synchronisation, where Facebook and Gmail contacts are automatically populated throughout the address book in an intelligent way. We contacted Motorola to ask why this was missing from the Milestone, and it said that it is not aiming this phone at the same market as the Dext. We firmly believe that these security elements would be a useful addition for anyone, not just social networkers.

A feature we haven't seen before is the Moto Phone Portal, a remote way of accessing the phone through a web browser on a computer. When launching the application on the handset the user is presented with an option to connect via USB or Wi-Fi, the latter producing an IP address and port. From here you are able to view call info on the phone from a PC-based browser, see and export the address book from the phone, and view and send text messages. It could be seen as a little bit gimmicky, but we actually found it rather useful in the end, especially when sending text messages.

Screen
Motorola's Milestone has one of the largest screens we've seen on a mobile, and is the largest on any shipping Android handset today. It has a huge 3.7in 480 x 854 WVGA capacitive touchscreen display, the slightest touch being interpreted with pinpoint accuracy.

It's a far cry from the small hit and miss 3.2in resistive screen we last saw on the HTC Android Tattoo mobile. The Samsung i8910 HD also boasts the same screen size as the Milestone, only with a much lower 360 x 640 resolution. LG's Crystal handset has a similar resolution of 480 x 800, only on a 3in screen, and the larger Milestone display comes across much better in every respect.

Motorola has gone on record in claiming the Milestone is the thinnest handset around today with a full Qwerty slide out keyboard. The handset does fare well in size against the previous Motorola Dext, which is 16mm thick, 114mm long and 58mm wide, whereas the Milestone form factor is 13.7mm deep, 115.8mm long and 60mm wide.

Keyboard
The physical keyboard on the Milestone slides stiffly out from under the screen. Its keys are all laid out very close together and are very flat. We discovered we could easily hold the phone with the keyboard exposed between two hands, while using the thumbs alone for typing. All this was comfortable enough, if only reaching the keys on the left was achievable with great ease, which it wasn't.

This is all down to the inclusion of a frankly unnecessary four-way control d-pad on the right, which forces the keyboard from being dead centre. Typing on the touch screen in landscape mode was a pleasure with its very wide display. Thanks must go here to Android 2.0, with its better auto-completion and spell checking that isn't available when the physical keyboard is in use.

The mobile runs on an ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 550MHz. This is about half the speed of the fastest Snapdragon chip in other phones, but the Milestone appears faster in operation than its beefier counterparts thanks to the Android OS. On board is a small amount of addressable memory at 197MB, but Motorola has thrown in an 8GB microSD card, and the device has been tested successfully on the upcoming 32GB version. There is also is a 5-megapixel camera with a dual LED flash. The photos were a bit hit and miss in terms of quality, and the image autofocus leaves much to be desired, but we're hearing there's a hot fix any day now to help clear that up.

Motorola has included a 3.5mm audio jack on the top of the handset, allowing the phone to sit comfortably in a pocket without having the headphone jack jutting out from the side. Phones such as the Blackberry Storm and Storm 2 have their audio sockets located rather awkwardly on the side where it's uncomfortable to have headphones connected. Just try the two formats over a day's use and you'll see why we applaud mobile phone makers that get this right.

Battery
Battery life on touchscreen devices with a physical Qwerty keyboard has traditionally not been all that great, as both aspects have to be powered and both can be heavy power draws. We had expected a smaller battery to produce the more slimline form factor of the Milestone, but we were wrong. Accompanying the Motorola Milestone is a 1400mAh battery, which proved to have some might behind it as our tests discovered. Over the course of a long day while fetching quite a lot of emails into Gmail, the handset managed to last for nine hours and five minutes worth of calls. This is the longest battery life we've seen in any handset, trumping the HTC Snap’s eight hours and 45 minutes which held our previous record.

Android 2.0, 3.7in 480 x 854 touchscreen display, slide-out Qwerty keyboard, 5-megapixel camera, 3.5mm audio jack, quad-band GSM, 8GB microSD card, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, microUSB.