Motorola Milestone

The first thing you'll notice about the Motorola Milestone is the build quality - compare it to some Android phones out there and you'll feel that it's much better.The phone is noticeably thinner than before, coming in at just 13.7mm thick, which is impressive when you realise that it packs a full QWERTY keyboard into that frame as well.

The design is quite comfortable and all the elements are placed rightly as far as ergonomics is concerned. The phone is slim enough to fit into tight jeans as well. The build quality is excellent.

The MILESTONE is equipped with a large 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen display with 480×854 pixels resolution and displaying upto 16 million colours.The first keys that you will notice on the Motorola MILESTONE are the touch-sensitive keys below the screen. There are four of them- Back, Menu (Options), Home and Search. The keys also have Haptic feedback like the display so feedback from the buttons are good.

On opening the slide, the four row QWERTY keypad and the D-pad are revealed. The D-Pad is excellent even though the design is slightly different from the normal squarish d-pads. The keyboard has good feedback even though the keys are almost flat.

The vast connectivity options include GPRS, Wi-Fi, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA, micro-USB and Bluetooth 2.1. The micro-USB copying speeds are very fast and no lags were noticed even for large files. There is 133MB of internal memory available and it can be expanded using micro-SD cards. There is support for cards upto 32GB.

The MILESTONE has very good signal reception as well as sound quality. There are no disturbances but the sounds produced are a bit hollow. You don’t need the maximum volume to hear clearly in normal surroundings.

Thanks to the QWERTY keyboard, you can send messages quickly with ease.

The Milestone packs a modest 5 MP Camera with Dual LED Flash , Automatic Focus , image stabilization and 4x digital zoom. While most Android phones don’t have a dedicated Camera key, the Milestone indeed has one and is a welcome addition. While the photos taken in day light are pretty good there is too much noise in low light conditions.

The phone runs on Android 2.1 Operating System. We could not see MotoBlur UI anywhere. The Android 2.1 update brought several improvements to the phone. Live Wallpapers are available and are super cool but take a toll on battery life.While the company quotes a Stand-by time of 350 hours and 6.5 hours of talk time, the 1400mAh battery did not live up to expectations.

We can’t deny that the Milestone is a great device. It has more pros than cons and we would certainly recommend the device if you are in the market for a Android phone. In fact it’s the best Android QWERTY phone today and no other handset has managed to oust the Milestone from this title for several months