Motorola's Milestone has one of the largest screens we've seen on a mobile along with being the largest on any shipping Android handset today. It has a massive 3.7-inch 480x854 WVGA capacitive touchscreen display, with the slightest touch being very well interpreted with pinpoint accuracy. It's a far cry from the small hit and miss 3.2-inch 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 360x640 resolution. LG's Crystal handset does have a similar resolution of 480x800, only on a 3-inch screen with the larger Milestone display coming across much better in every respect.
When it comes to design, Motorola recently seems to have wandered off in the wrong direction. This was very much evident in the bulky and ugly Dext, and unfortunately with the Milestone its design team still seems to be lost in the wilderness. To put it mildly this is a strange looking phone. Like the Dext the handset has a slide out QWERTY keyboard, but unlike that model the screen here doesn’t fully cover the bottom half of the phone when it’s closed. Instead it leaves a lip jutting out at the bottom. This lip feels quite odd when you’re using the keyboard, is a magnet for dust and, well, just looks plain wrong. Even without this odd lip, the phone wouldn’t exactly be a looker as the overall design has a very boxy and industrial feel to it. However, at least the sturdy build quality and smooth sliding mechanism for the keyboard do give you the impression that the phone will stand up to a fair number of knocks and scrapes over its lifetime.
Furthermore, because the screen uses capacitance technology Motorola has been able to support the multi-touch pinch to zoom gesture. When the handset first arrived pinch to zoom only worked in the web browser, but during our review period Google released a new version of Google Maps which added pinch to zoom support too and the Media Gallery was also updated to support it. The zooming isn’t quite as smooth as on the iPhone, but it still works well and is especially useful in the browser where it makes it easier to navigate pages and position columns of texts on the screen for better readability.
Motorola has included a 3.5mm audio jack on the top of the handset. Having the socket located there means it sits comfortably in a pocket without having the headphone jack jut 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 as a result. Just try the two formats over a day's use and you'll see why we applaud mobile phone makers who get this right.
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 still 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 Blackberry-esque mobile of eight hours and forty-five minutes which held our previous record.
Specs:
General 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 900 / 2100
UMTS 850 / 1900 - American version
Status Available. Released 2009, November
Size Dimensions 115.8 x 60 x 13.7 mm
Weight 165 g
Display Type TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 480 x 854 pixels, 3.7 inches
- Multi-touch input method
- Accelerometer sensor
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Full QWERTY keyboard with 5-way navigation key
Sound Alert types Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
Speakerphone Yes, with stereo speakers
- 3.5 mm audio jack
Memory Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photo call
Call records Practically unlimited
Internal 133 MB storage, 256 MB RAM
Card slot microSD, up to 32GB, 8GB included, buy memory
Data GPRS Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
EDGE Class 12
3G HSDPA, 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.1 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, microUSB v2.0
Camera Primary 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus, dual-LED flash
Features Geo-tagging
Video Yes, D1 (720x480 pixels)@24fps
Secondary No
Features OS Android OS, v2 (Eclair)
CPU ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX530 graphics
Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM, Push Email
Browser HTML
Radio No
Colors Black
GPS Yes, with A-GPS support, Motonav software
Java
- Digital compass
- MP3/eAAC+/WAV/WMA9 player
- MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV9 player
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail,
- YouTube, Google Talk
- Adobe Flash Player v10.1
- Document viewer
- Photo viewer/editor
- Organizer
- Voice memo/dial
- T9
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1400 mAh (BP6X)
Stand-by Up to 350 h
Talk time Up to 6 h 30 min
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