Hello, Milestone

Again, thanks to Will I’m now on my second Android phone, this time the flagship Android phone from Motorola – the Milestone (the GSM version of the Droid).

The quality of the photos of the device are a little so so – I’m fighting off sinusitis and bronchitis at the moment, so I just don’t care.

 

The Good

I think the design is one of those "love or hate" designs – it has rather striking straight lights and "sharp" corners, unlike most phones these days. It’s weightier than it probably needs to be, but that gives it an incredibly solid feel to it.

There is a lot to like about this phone, however there are two stand out features (for me)

• I feel the need, the need for..
  Speed. This thing is fast. The difference between the speed of this phone and all others I’ve had/used before is impressive. While ~50mhz slower than the iPhone, or ~450mhz slower than the Nexus One’s 1ghz Snapdragon processor, the Milestone has a dedicated GPU. It gets shit done.

• The Screen
  The screen specs are 3.7", 854 x 480px, TFT LCD, 16M colours.

  Yes, it drains the battery, but damn it looks good. I was a little concerned thinking that all the text would be tiny compared to the Dream (480 x 320 – same as the iPhone), but for the most part it just makes text so much clearer and easier to read.

   

  Apparently the Nexus One screen (which has the slightly lower resolution of 800 x 480) is even better than the Milestone, which is scary awesome.

The Bad

Not everything is perfect on the Milestone, however. These complaints however, are (mostly) me nitpicking as much as possible.

• The Keyboard
  See below in the comparison against the Dream for details, but the keyboard sucks. Still better than onscreen however.

• MicroSD Slot
  The MicroSD slot is unfortunately impossible to get to without removing the battery. This is annoying because it somewhat defeats the obvious argument against internal-only storage of "you can have multiple SD cards and change whenever you like"

• The Camera
  Don’t get me wrong, a 5mpx + Dual LED flash is neat. It takes good enough photos and video. For the sensor the size it is, 5mpx is overkill and creates some extra ISO noise but again, the photo quality is good enough.

  The problem I have with the (still) camera is the desire to use the flash in every situation – that is, every time I’ve tried to take a photo, it’ll use the flash if ‘auto-flash’ is enabled.

  Below, on the left is flash disabled, and on the right with auto-flash enabled. The irony is is, apart from the shot without the flash having better/more accurate colours, the flash actually make the image blur!

 

Against the HTC Dream

The obvious comparison for me is between the Dream and Milestone, but mostly it should be considered an unfair comparison. For starters, the Dream was released in October 2008 whereas the Droid/Milestone in November 2009, and while the G1 wasn’t considered the lowest end in its day, it was never a real "premium" phone, which the Milestone clearly is.

Specification wise, nearly everything is better – faster CPU, higher res screen, more onboard flash, better camera, better Bluetooth support, the list goes on. However it is interesting to note that the Milestone doesn’t win in all categories.

Keyboard
Like the Dream, the Milestone is a slider with a qwerty keyboard. However unlike the Dream, the Milestones keys don’t have a gap between each key, are far flatter, and have less "travel".
The key advantage physical keyboards have over onscreen keyboards is the tactile response, whether it is being able to tell where one key ends/starts because of the key separation or by having to push the key down (rather than float over it).

Apart from the less than ideal keys, the keyboard layout itself is a little funny. Instead of a five row key layout, they’ve gone for four which results in requiring alt to be pressed to enter a number. Although not as big a problem as the keys themselves, it is still a little frustrating.

Without a doubt, the Dream’s keyboard is just simply better.

It is interesting that the lower end Motorola Devour coming out seems to have a far better keyboard (Motorola promoting the raised keys)

Hardware Buttons
While the Milestone is not devoid of hardware buttons, Motorola’s choice of input is a little… lacking? Two (fairly standard) buttons are missing ("accept call" and "end call"), and unlike the Dream (and many Blackberrys) the scroller is gone in favour of a D-Pad which is hidden unless you slide out the keyboard.

Build Quality
There is no comparison here, and this is part of what I meant by the Dream not being a premium phone – the Milestone is just so solidly built with far better finish. The best example I can think of is the sliding mechanism – on the Dream it’ll rattle if the phone vibrates (call/notification/etc), whereas the Milestone is just solid.

Android 2.x

Apart from neat hardware, the other thing that the Milestone is rocking is Android 2.0.1, and what a difference it makes. Apart from everything seeming so much smoother and faster, Exchange support is built in! There are lots of improvements, but to be honest, I’ve barely scratched the surface of Android 1.6 let alone 2.0!

Google have a fairly detailed list of highlights for Android 2.0

I think the Contacts API is interesting, it allows multiple data stores for a single contact, so you could sync Facebook contacts to Gmail contacts. The Facebook app doesn’t work 100% for the Milestone (does for Droid/Nexus One) just yet, but it looks interesting. As does the possibility of extending this with Twitter/MahTweets Mobile.