14 Days with the Motorola Milestone

Introduction

Recent times have not been kind to Motorola. The once undisputed kings of mobile, the once number one manufacturer of mobile phones in the world, have had a hard fall from grace. With the emergence of Nokia, coinciding almost with the emergence of GSM digital, Motorola started a slide that has led them to become almost a laughing stock within the industry. There have been some notable handsets along the way, it has to be said. The slide from grace happened over a period of time, and it is worth remembering that it was Motorola who brought us such innovations as the Motorola Star Tac, V3688 and RAZR. But it hasn’t all been great, with Motorola responsible for products like the RIZR, SLVR and ROKR, too. But recently things have started to look up, and Motorola seem to be working closely with the Android Operating System, allowing them to focus on delivering handsets at a lower cost to themselves, seeing that the platform is already worked on and readily available. Motorola just need to come up with a shell to stick it in, basically. And so we come to the focus of our review, the Motorola Milestone.

The Milestone, known as the Droid in the States (which is a much cooler name, why did it get changed?) is leading the charge in Motorola’s resurgence, and as such a lot rides on the success of the phone. I’ve been using the handset for the last few weeks as my main phone, and it’s time to see if the Milestone has what it takes to help restore the flagging fortunes of this once manufacturing great.

Design

To look at, the Milestone does not scream ‘cool’. I dislike using the terms ‘sexy’ when describing material products, but some phones are very desirable gadgets, with a form factor that instantly shouts ‘Buy me!’ I can’t apply that to the Milestone. That said the device isn’t so ugly I wouldn’t want to use it in public, either. The Milestone has a solid feel, and when you first pick it up you instantly know that it is a serious bit of kit, and the ‘squareness’ of the edges just seem to add to the feel of a device that may not have the looks, but certainly has the ability to perform.

The Milestone is dominated by a large, 3.7 inch touchscreen, a TFT capacitive screen that supports up to 16 million colours. It is great to look at, and when I’ve been showing the phone off to friends, all have commented on the display. The touch of the screen is very assuring, and certainly works better than some devices with resistive touchscreens that I have used in the past, and means that interacting with the phone is very pleasing. Holding the phone in portrait mode, at the bottom of the display are four touch sensitive buttons, reading from left to right these are the back, menu, home and search buttons. You get a little vibrating feedback when selecting these keys, and in general use they were sensitive enough for what I needed, although I found it very easy to accidentally touch them and activate a feature I didn’t want, when generally handling the phone.

Around the outside of the phone there are various ports and control buttons; at the top there is a 3.5mm audio jack, located next to the power button, which also doubles up as the lock button. You need to press this button to ‘wake’ the phone after it shuts down into standby, which can be automatically after a period of non use or can be done manually using the same lock key. I’m quite used to using Android phones, and as far as I recall the Milestone is the first device I’ve used that could only be brought out of standby with the power key, on other phones I could at least activate the screen by pressing the menu, or home key. It took a while to get used to only being able to use the one key for this, and its location at the top of the device made it feel a bit cumbersome to do.

Down the left hand side of the phone, near the top end, is the micro USB port, which you use for both connecting the phone to a PC and to charge the device. The device can charge from a mains lead and also via the PC. There is nothing along the bottom of the phone, whilst down the right hand side there is a camera key near the bottom, which can be used for launching the camera application as well as capturing images, and at the top of the right hand side is a rocker style volume control key. Over on the back of the phone, there is the battery cover, which lies next to the loud speaker grill and at the top the lens for the 5.0 Megapixel camera, which has an LED flash located to the left of it.

The phone is not overly large, considering the size of the display, and is in proportion to something like the iPhone, for example. Generally the design is functional, but there were a couple of elements I did not like. Firstly, the gold colour camera key on the right hand side looks extremely naff, and would have been better matching the look of the power key. It just looks odd there. The other part of the design that put me off a bit is the lower ‘chin’ of the Milestone. It looks out of place, and other than being where the microphone is stored it seems to serve no purpose. The microphone could easily be incorporated more into the body of the phone, and without this ‘chin’ the overall look would be much improved.

The Milestone has a slide out QWERTY keyboard incorporated, and sliding the keypad out instantly ‘wakes’ the device from standby and flips the display into landscape mode. The keys on the keypad are a bit flat, so it takes a while to get used to typing on them, but they are well spaced enough to make this achievable. To the right of the keypad is the Navi key, and after the Navi key comes the chin. This makes typing a bit difficult. I would hold the phone in both hands and generally type with my thumbs, rather than hold the phone in one hand and type with the other, and the positioning of the Navi key and the chin to the right meant I was forever stretching over with my right thumb to reach keys which ordinarily on a better laid out keypad wouldn’t be a problem. If the chin needs to stay, it would have been preferable to have had the Navi key to the left of the keys, making the keypad itself more central and easier to use. Regarding the Navi key itself, it hardly gets any use, but I would hate to see it left out all together. It comes into its own when needing to go back to a part of a message and correct a typo, or re-arrange a part of the text. For this reason alone, the Navi key is worth keeping in. It can also help when browsing the web on move the cursor from hyperlink to hyperlink, on pages that are not very well optimised for mobile browsing.

Making Calls

There are no send/end hard keys on the Milestone, so to launch the phone application you need to simply press on the phone icon on the main screen. Doing so brings up a large, well spaced traditional digital phone keypad, which you can us to manually enter phone numbers. Underneath the 12 keys is a green dial icon, flanked on either side by a delete key, and a shortcut to dialling the answerphone. As you type the number on the display the number is presented in a box above the keypad. Above this are four on screen buttons, the phone tab, plus a tab for call log, contacts and favourites. Marking contacts as favourites is a simple process, simply open the contacts tab, open an individual contact and press the favourites star at the top of the screen. Once selected, all starred contacts will appear in your favourites list. When making a call on the Milestone, audio is clear enough, but also a little quiet, even on a high volume setting. The screen will auto disable when on call so your cheek does not activate any features, but it does take a few seconds when removing the phone from your face for the screen to re-activate, making it difficult to hang up a call. A hard end call key here would be very beneficial.

The phone book itself is easy to navigate. The Milestone pulled all my contacts over from Google very quickly, and you can navigate through the list by swiping through the contacts with a grand swiping gesture, allowing the kinetic scrolling to whiz you through the list of contacts. If you have a few hundred contacts, then you can use the on screen button at the side to run through your contacts jumping through the alphabet to more easily locate the contact you are looking for. Each contact can have a variety of information stored under their name, including a photo, multiple phone numbers for mobile and landline, email addresses, postal address, web address, organisation details, even a nickname, plus a space to add notes.

Something I find very useful, as it has not been unknown for me to scroll through my contact list every once in a while and wonder just who some details belong too, a name and number taken a while ago and details about that person long since forgotten! Touching on the various contact elements will allow you to interact directly with the person listed, so to call just tap on the relevant number, to email just tap on their email address and the email client instantly kicks in. I find the whole phonebook layout very logical, easy to use, and I’m particularly keen on the favourites feature, it saves a lot of time.

Messaging

Text messaging on the Milestone is another well thought out, well laid out application. Conversations are listed in a threaded format, making it so easy to follow the conversation, especially if you have more than one text conversation on the go. Messages can be locked, forwarded, and text copied by pressing and holding down on the little envelope icon at the side of each sent text. Through this you can also find the delivery status of your message, if you have activated the message delivery report feature. As a Gmail user, I have found the email integration on all Android devices I have used to be top notch, and the Milestone is no exception. Notification of incoming messages seems to me to be almost instant; when I am at home in front of my PC I sometimes get alerts on the device before my inbox is even showing a received email.

As well as the standard email and messaging application, it is very easy to keep in touch on the Milestone with contacts on social networks. Through the Android market there are a variety of apps available for Facebook, Twitter, etc, and all the ones I tried worked really well. Typing messages on the hardware QWERTY keyboard gets easier over time, as you learn to cope with the design issues, but most often I found myself quite happily using the on screen QWERTY, and also over the last few days I have been using Swype on the phone, an application I am quickly becoming a big fan of.

Media

Gallery: Media has never been a strong point of Android, with early devices offering a pretty poor representation of captured media. The Milestone media gallery is not going to set it amongst the great media phones, but personally I’m a fan of simple presentation and therefore like the simple layout the Milestone uses. When opening the Media Gallery, all pictures on the device are laid out with little thumbnail options for each image. You can easily scroll through the images by flicking your way across the screen, or you can flip the Milestone on to its side and then scroll through larger thumbnail images in a very pleasant snaking carousel like presentation. There is a drop down filter box in the top left hand corner of the screen, through which you can choose which media you want to look through. Options include all pictures, captured images, tags, folders and all videos. You can also slideshow the images, and there are a few settings that allow you to choose how the slideshow is presented. In the settings you will also find an option to set up quick send sharing, which allows you to share your content to specified addresses, without having to type them in manually each time.

Music: The music player on the Milestone is another area where you could say it should be better presented. Opening the music menu offers you four large buttons on screen, to search through stored content via artist, album, songs or playlists. Choosing one leads you into the relevant list of music, simply scroll through the list and press on the name of the song you want. And it plays. Very simple, very light on ‘eye candy’, but it is at least functional and straight forward to use. Music played through the loud speaker sounds good, but not spectacular; thanks to the 3.5mm audio output jack you can use your own headset to listen to the music, too. Album art is displayed if available and other information on screen shows the album name, artist and track name of the tune currently being played. There is a shuffle option, repeat, and playlist chooser. At the bottom of the screen we find the fast forward/rewind and play/pause buttons, and there is a meter which measures how far into a track you have played. It’s a very basic layout, for sure, but sometimes less is more and the best thing you can say is the simple layout will mean most people should be able to choose and play their music with little fuss.

Camera and Video Recording

The Milestone is equipped with a 5.0 Megapixel camera, with dual LED flash, which supports autofocus and geotagging. You can open the camera through the menu or via the quick launch key on the side of the device, and once launched the main part of the display becomes the image view finder, with a small section to the right closed off. Here you will find a thumbnail at the top of the last image captured, a quick shortcut to flick between the camcorder and camera app, and a button for capturing images. The button on the screen when pressed will automatically focus and capture the image in one go. If you use the manual button on the side of the device you can focus in on your image by gently squeezing the button before capturing the image by completely pressing the button in. The Milestone is capable of capturing video at up to 24 fps per second, and a maximum resolution of 720 x 480 pixels. Below are some sample, unedited images and video clip below, taken on the Milestone:

Web Browser and Connectivity

It is rare to find an Android powered phone that does not offer a full suite of connection options, and the Milestone is not the exception. The device is packed with 3G, HSDPA Mobile Broadband, EDGE, GPRS and WiFi, all designed to keep you in touch and connected wherever you happen to be. I’m fortunate to live in an area where HSDPA is prevalent pretty much all over, and web browsing on the Milestone is a real pleasure, particularly with the large capacitive screen. The Milestone supports multi touch, and this allows you to zoom in and out by using a pinching and opening gesture with two fingers on the display. This is particularly useful on some not so well optimised websites, by simply zooming in it can make some links easier to select than they otherwise would be. Most websites work well on the Milestone, and the touch version of Facebook is my preferred way to use the service, rather than a third party app. The overall feel of browsing on the Milestone leaves one with a positive impression, with a simple to navigate interface and quick page loading.

Operating System

The Milestone came delivered with Android OS 2.0 installed, and a quick scan via the menu system led me to the latest Motorola update, Android 2.0.1 The Milestone does not have MotoBLUR included, so the standard standby is the native three screen option found on vanilla Android devices. Customisation is king with Android, and it is a simple action to populate the three screens with shortcuts to favourite apps. And of course, there is the full Android Market available, with thousands of apps to download and enjoy, some free, some not. It is not difficult to use Android, and that simple point lies behind the quick rise of this fairly new mobile platform. Multi tasking is simple, and the Milestone coped well, I had no issues browsing the web and using the camera with the music player playing along in the background. In all things I did the Milestone coped admirably.

Summary

In summary, the Motorola Milestone is a fine product, and one that should deliver a bit of pride back to the Motorola name. During my time using the device I came to like it, a lot, and although I had issues getting comfortable with the QWERTY keypad, and the design, both because of that silly ‘chin’, there was a lot more to like than dislike. I’ve mentioned it a few times, but the screen on the device is a real beaut, large and clear, and the whole device feels solid and robust.

The slide out QWERTY keyboard snaps into place with a satisfying little click, which just adds to the feel of the build quality. In usage the Milestone would generally last me a clear day on one charge, which is about the norm for a modern touchscreen smartphone, and I found it to be a stable product. I shall miss not having it anymore, and given the opportunity I would have no hesitation in purchasing the phone, and I’d be more than happy to recommend it as a top buy. All in all a decent phone, and a welcome return to form from Motorola.

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