Motorola MILESTONE deals & review

Better known in the US and other markets as the Droid, the Motorola Milestone full-QWERTY Slider/Touchscreen smartphone is Motorola’s second foray into Android technology in the GSM networks running the Google Android 2.0 Éclair. It comes after the Motorola Dext Android and is available from T-Mobile, Orange and O2 starting at £25 per month on their subscription plans.  

Superlative Features

The World’s 4^th largest mobile phone maker certainly knows how to enter markets with a big bang as the Milestone offers big bang for the bucks with its first two Android offerings. It is 3.7-inch Wide-VGA supports 16 millions colors and comes with capacitive touchscreen and AMOLED display technologies under a real glass surface on an all-metal body.

With a capacitive touchscreen, the European version comes with multitouch data input capability that does pretty much what the iPhone can do but on a larger screen. You can double tap to zoom in or out, slide screens with a swipe of a finger and squeeze fingers to zoom web pages. It has the usual touchscreen auto-disable proximity sensor as well as a gravity accelerometer for auto-rotate viewing.

These features no doubt showcase one of Android features that clearly make it superior to the MS Windows Mobile.

It doesn’t use the Snapdragon but uses a more modest ARM Cortex A8 clocked at 550 MHz that’s as powerful as the one powering the iPhone 3Gs. Needless to say, the Milestone is a quad band GSM with class 12 GPRS/EDGE on 2G and a dual band UMTS on 3G with HSPA data connectivity for a no-wait surfing and downloading on the net. 

WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR are there for wireless data connectivity. SatNav is supported with a built-in GPS receiver with digital compass and Google Maps preloaded in the US Droid version while the European version gets the MOTONAV GPS application that does the same with voice turn-by-turn direction.

Another outstanding feature on the Motorola Milestone, though fairly common in upscale handsets, is a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash and Wide-VGA recording at 24 fps frame rates. Multimedia gets no FM radio but you get capable media players for MP3, eAAC+, WAV and WMA9 audio files and MP4, H.263/H.264 and WMV9 video files. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack for wired headsets and its A2DP profile support on Bluetooth lets you use wireless stereo earphones.

Phone memory gets a 256MB RAM with 133MN user storage space that can be expanded up to 32GB from its microSD external memory expansion slot. Its retail package comes with a free 8GB microSD card.   Its 1400 mAh Li-Ion battery (BP6X) yields 6.5 hours of talk time and 14 days in standby time on a single full charge.