Motorola Milestone

The high-end Milestone--sold as the Droid in the US--is Motorola's second Android-based smartphone, and the first to run version 2.0 of Google's mobile OS, codenamed Eclair.

With a high resolution capitative touchscreen display that supports multitouch, a full-size slide-out keyboard, a 5 Megapixel camera and a web browser that has already proved itself elsewher, the Milestone has just about everything we're looking for in a smartphone today.  But so much for the theory: what's it like in practice?



Double-take: one screen, two keyboards

The Milestone has a vintage style to it that you'll either love or loathe.  Its sleek black exterior is all sharp angles, with a few touches of copper-coloured trim--just a tiny bit kitsch that--and it looks either elegant or formal, depending on your point of view.


Despite its slide-out keyboard, the Milestone is still pretty thin (thinner than the Dext for instance), even if can't hide its 165 g weight from the scales, or from your pocket for that matter.  Being a heavyweight doesn't ruin the build quality of the handset at all: there's no give at all between the screen and the keyboard when it's closed.  On the other hand, when we opened it for the first time, we were surprised to see that the keyboard didn't slide out as quickly and easily as we'd exoected, and you can feel a little friction as it moves.  It's nothing too irritating, and there's a perfectly reason for it: the keyboard needs to move perfectly into place hundreds and hundreds of times.  All the way through the test, we continued to get the impression that is a solid, robust phone, and the choice of materials and the way they're put together both inspire confidence. 


The generous 3.7'' display has a great resolution of 854 x 480 pixels--half as much again as the iPhone.  It's bright enough, which makes it nice and sharp, and the colours are accurate too--but watch out for those reflections from the glossy surface.  Above all, the main problem is that it's not as good as the AMOLED display we saw recently on the Samsung HD.

There are four touch-sensitive buttons underneath the screen (back, menu, home and search), which we occasionally brushed across by mistake.  Real buttons, even small ones, would probably have been a better choice in this case.  The standby button is tricky to reach at the top of the handset.

The capacitive touchscreen is as responsive and accurate as we would have expected.  Multitouch (for both photos and web pages), uses the same set of gestures as on the iPhone, and is implemented perfectly--or at least as well as it is on the iPhone 3GS, anyway, and more responsively than on the HTC HD2 in any case.

We found the backlit keyboard very easy to use.  When you slide it out, the screen automatically flips to landscape orientation.  We were disappointed by the raised, smooth surface of the keys on the Dext, but typing here is much easier.  The keys are set out over four rows (giving this phone an advantage over the N900) and are far enough apart to give a reasonably comfortable typing experience, although some people might find that they're not deep enough.  Still, typing on the Milestone is never going to be as comfortable as typing on a BlackBerry.


The directional touchpad at the right of the main keyboard would have been easier to use if it wasn't bordered by a slippy, glossy area.  You can use it to move left and right or scroll up and down, click by click, but we rarely bothered, preferring instead the more intuitive touchscreen.  The virtual keyboard performs well in both landscape and portrait mode, even if it isn't as accurate as the once on the iPhone: we often found it flashing up a letter just next to the one we intended to type.  That said, we found ourselves using the physical keyboard much more during this test!

The accelerometer was fast in every application we tried it in.

Interface and navigation

Using it, we really enjoyed the smooth, fluid experience offered by the Milestone.  Moving from one desktop to the next (there are three in total), or bringing up the main menu, is very easy, and there are no problems with lag.



You can access multitasking by pressing and holding the home button, but you'd better head over to Android Market and get an app called 'Task Killer' so you can stop them too: leaving too many running in the background uses lots of power.  And although the Milestone is responsive enough in general, it begins to slow down when it's running lots of applications at once.  One way to tell is by looking at photos in the multimedia gallery: scrolling from one to the next is noticeably slower.


The combination of a high-resolution screen and responsive hardware make browsing online using Chrome Mobile a very enjoyable experience.  We tried plenty of sites, and they all loaded quickly.  Scrolling through pages was smoother than they we've come to expect on this type of handset.  To zoom in,  you use your fingers, either double-tapping on the area you like, or by pinching your fingers together.


We only missed one thing: being able to get back to the top of the page by tapping once close to the top of the screen, like you can on an iPhone.  Here, you have to keep scrolling and scrolling, even if the page is very long.  If, on the other hand, you're at the top of a long page, it's very easy to reach the bottom, where you'd have to scroll several times on the iPhone. 

We also found some pages were readable straight away on the iPhone, but needed a little zomming on the Milestone first.  That's because the iPhone increases the size of text, though, which adjusts the layout of the page along the way.  The Milestone keeps things intact, and at the end of the day, both solutions work well.  To finish with the web section, we were promised Flash support, but had to make do with Flash Lite.  Although YouTube works thanks to the dedicated app, other video sharing sites that rely on Flash didn't work.  According to Adobe, Flash 10.1 will be available in the first half of 2010 ...


Focussing in photos and videos varies a lot, but rarely produces blurry results.  The stills camera has a rather capricious autofocus system, and you can't choose where you'd like to place the focus onscreen like you can on so many of its competitors.  Taking the photo itself is quite slow, as is saving it.  You need to wait at least three seconds in between each shot.  Although the photos it produces contain plenty of detail, the colours aren't the best we've seen.  Although the double-LED flash can help out in poor light, it also wipes out a lot of detail.

Given the choice between this and the 3 Megapixel camera on an iPhone 3G S, we still prefer the responsiveness and autofocus system offered by Apple for capturing everyday moments quickly.  Both handsets share the same weakness though: neither have zoom.  To get better quality photos, you should try a Nokia.