Design and Looks
The Motorola Milestone has a very professional look to it. With sharp edges and a big black rectangular form, the phone betrays Motorola tradition that is known for the best style in the handset market. Still, the Milestone could be a sign that Motorola is getting serious about other segments of the handset market.
The phone's most outstanding feature is undoubtedly the large 3.7” WVGA screen that is capable of 16 million colours over a resolution of 440 x 854. Not only do these numbers impress but so does the performance of the screen; the images are bright and lively and the display is easily the best on any Android device today. Below the display are four touch-sensitive keys that perform the Android functions- Back, Home, Search and Menu.
The slim phone may give the impression that it's a full touch bar but surprisingly, Motorola managed to squeeze in a slide-out QWERTY under the display. At 13.7mm, the Milestone is the thinnest QWIRTY phone till date. The 4-row QWERTY keyboard unfortunately fails to impress with its small and hard-to-press keys. Typos are without a question inevitable and so are accidental multiple-key presses. To the right of the QWERTY is a large D-pad that's much more comfortable to use than the keypad. The sliding action of the QWERTY is flawed and does not lock into place; repeated use may make it loose.
The Android 2.0 OS (Éclair) is intuitive but is still in its seeding stages. As of now, it offers users a decent set of functions including nice organizing and personal management features including Microsoft Exchange sync to sync email, calendar and contacts and a universal search option. The media features are stale but do the job. Audio quality is good at both places; coming out of the 3.5mm audio port and the loudspeaker. The speakerphone is also very loud even at low volumes which may rk some people who would like to keep their cell phones quiet. Speaking of telephony, there is no physical call control so users will have to go to the homescreen every time they wish to dial a number.
The phone has a 5MP camera that performs quite poorly producing grainy images tinged with a magenta hue. Video recording is decent at D1 resolution at 24 frames-per-second.
The phone's USP is the browser, of course, and Motorola have spared little effort in making it tablet-worthy. The browser offers multi-touch and Adobe Flash Lite support as of now. In the future the browser may offer Adobe Flash Player 10.1 support. Other features of the browser include multi-touch zoom and visual bookmarks in addition to full HTML support and multiple tabs browsing.
The Milestone is also GPS enabled and navigation is provided by Motorola's MotoNav. Finally, no self-respecting tablet-phone comes without social networking integration, so Motorola offers integration with popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
In short, the Milestone is a complete tablet-phone package with all the essentials. It only lacks in better media capabilities.
The phone is yet to come to India but and will most likely be priced above Rs. 30,000.
Features
- Slim QWERTY slider form-factor
- 3.7-inch 16million colour TFT capacitive touchscreen
- ARM Cortex A8 550MHz processor
- 5MP camera with autofocus and dual-LED flash
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- Complete connectivity package including Wi-Fi and 3G
- GPS with A-GPS functionality
- Android 2.0 operating system
- Microsoft Exchange sync
- Browser with full flash support
- Multi-touch support
- Video recording at D1 resolution and 24fps
Accessories
- Multimedia Station for docking Milestone
- Bluetooth Headset H790
- Motorola Milestone Car Mount
- Motorola EQ5 Portable Wireless Speaker
- Bluetooth Headset H390
