Motorola Milestone review

Motorola is now gaining attention in the the smartphone arena with couple of big launches in the recent times. Moto's first Android-powered device the DEXT has been received well in the US market and now the company has released another impressive device the Motorola Milestone (dubbed as DROID in the US), with some superb specs.

The new Moto device comes with the first improvement in the hardware segment as the device sports slimmer casing, although larger than the DEXT's. The Milestone, with its heavier weight, gives a a lot more solid and premium feeling to the users.

Made with a single panel with the keys separated by a groove, Milestone's QWERTY keyboard feels a little cheaper and doesn't offer comfortable typing experience to the users. You may find while typing that the neighbouring one moves with it slightly, which makes typing experience a bit annoying. Sometimes, you  may also lose spacing between the letters while typing.

The next big issue you face with this landscape-sliding device is that there's hardly enough space under the screen to comfortably type using the top row of keys. It's surprising though that still many manufacturers haven't been able to decipher that only a couple of milimeters will make all the difference?

Furthermore, the Milestone displays a four-way navigation key to the right of the keyboard. It gives a false impression as though it may have some touch sensitivity. However, this is not exactly what it seems like - it's simply a hardware button for those who don't like using the touchscreen.

However, the big plus with this device is undoubtedly its 480x854 pixel, 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen. It's simply fantastic. To our utter delight, it responded to every touch and it is crisp and bright - exactly the way you would want a high-end touchscreen device to function.

Moving further below the touchscreen (or you may find it to the right of the device in the landscape mode) on the Milestone are four touch sensitive keys - back, menu, home or search. These all tools are pretty standard, and the search key feature is probably the most useful.

With the search key button, you can easily look for files saved on your device. It also helps you find your email and applications that you searched for on this device. In case, if the search result is unable to fetch desired results, it will simply prompt you to carry out a web search. But the panel that the display is laid into is not quite so impressive.

The few weak designing links attributed to this handset are in the form of the slide, which is stiff and hard to use, that will make you wonder why you'd ever endeavour to use the hardware QWERTY. We think a spring may be needed to make it a smoother operation.

The Milestone does boast of pretty much standard Android fare with its interface. It certainly isn't a disappointment by any margin. The improved interface offers three homescreens, onto which you can drag and drop widgets.

These can be shortcuts to applications, bookmarks, contacts, a route in MotoNAV, music playlist, Google Mail Label, or folders. In fact, the options are almost endless, ensuring anything you need to access quickly is only a single tap away.

Moto's impressive Milestone is the first Android device to run the 2.0 upgrade and it comes loaded with new and exciting features including Exchange support, a combined inbox, to access emails from multiple accounts in one inbox, a much improved virtual keyboard with multitouch for typing with two hands and a better predictive text mode.

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