 Motorola Milestone
Theo Boshoff
Heavyweight
Motorola is finally back in South Africa and the first device on offer is the Milestone smartphone, also known in the US as the Droid, running on the Android 2.1 operating system.
The Milestone’s design is quite bulky and weighty, but for people who like a phone that feels sturdy and less like a toy - as so many new versions of cellphones out there do – it’s ideal.
The phone sports a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, which we found a bit difficult to operate at first, especially with the top row of keys being so close to the screen when slid out. It’s almost as if you need long fingernails to reach and press the top-row keys.
The D-pad navigation button on the right-hand side also takes up a lot of space and takes getting used to. We feel the keyboard layout could have been improved with slightly bigger keys and a differently designed navigation button.
The extended 'lip' protruding on the right side also makes typing a tad uncomfortable. We're not sure what the idea was behind the design and bringing in the extra extension to the slide-out Qwerty keyboard, as it seems to have no real function or purpose.
What is impressive about the Milestone, however, is its 3.7-inch WVGA, 16 million-colour, capacitive multi-touch touchscreen (480 x 854 pixel resolution), with pinch and zoom functions. When opening the web browser, for instance, you can zoom into pages by pinching, then opening up your fingers. Scrolling down a page with your finger instead of a button also makes things so much easier. The screen is a delight. It's immensely crisp and bright and perfect for watching video clips and movies.
We were also impressed with the phone’s multitasking capabilities. You can run various applications and functions, and skip quickly and easily between them.
The user interface (UI) is Android 2.1, offering five screens that can be customised and filled with whatever apps and widgets you like, and navigating between the screens while running multiple apps is super-fast.
As it is an Android phone, it naturally also includes a suite of Google mobile applications, including Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail, with access to Android Market to acquire further applications. The Millestone also comes with Motonav for voice navigation.
The on-board five-megapixel camera is standard, and not exceptional. With the smooth integration with various social networking services, such as Facebook, and with the integrated GPS, having the camera for picture updates and geo-tagging is handy. It’s also capable of doing video recordings of 24 frames per second (fps).
The phone also sports a 600MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, 133MB storage, as well as a microSD card slot to add storage capacity.
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