'Motorola Milestone' Review (9/10)

I've had the Motorola Milestone (the Canadian take on the 'Droid') for a few months now having migrated from my HTC Touch Diamond (CDMA). I've used several Motorola phones in the past - some good (V3, Q9c) and a few not so great (V9, KRZR) so it was a little bit of a gamble (although it is not often that a flagship product is tragically flawed). The switch to the Milestone represents not only a change in hardware but an entire shift in paradigm. You see, the Milestone is powered by Google's Android operating system.

With my only other smartphone exposure being Windows Mobile based, I didn't quite know what to expect . In fact, I was kind of worried -- I had just started dabbling with little development projects with Windows Mobile. While I've not had the opportunity to start developing for Android, my experience so far suggests that it won't be a painful learning curve. In short: I'm (very) impressed.




The single biggest thing that stood out was the battery life. I've never seen such a night-and-day difference between flagship products (comparing to the Touch Diamond). I think it is worth mentioning illustrating how poor the battery was for me on the Diamond. With the Diamond plugged into the charger (screen/gps/wifi off, talking via bluetooth) -- I would get 2 hours talk time. This meant that the phone was being drained faster than the charger to recharge it. This happened from day one (and yes I got the battery and phone replaced). Throw in the atrocious gps-connect time (from instant to 15 minute, usually 10 minutes and upwards), it was really time to move on. While these are major faults, I think the real cause is the fact that the CDMA Touch Diamond was really just an afterthought to the GSM model.

Moving to the Milestone, I get 6 hrs+ talktime (and thats with the GPS running intermitantly in the background to synchronize with Latitude and the data connection, also intermitantly, synchronizing). If I just have the phone with me 'out and about', I can expect 10 hrs+ no sweat. It should be noted that should I forget to disengage the Google Navigation and the GPS is actively running, I can easily chew out 80% of the battery life in an hour.

What's great

• The exceptional resolution (480x854). Everytime I try to explain to a "mainstream" user that resolution matters, they always quip back with "what's the point, it's got a such a small screen [compared to a tv], the difference [in video quality] wont matter" or "what's the point, it's not like you can read such small letters". The catch is I can read those "small letters" (which, really, arent that small) and I can read the entire contents of the majority of postings/emails/etc on a single 'page' without having to scroll (ironically, it's this crowd that tends to preach about their 1080p television sets without understanding that such things are commonplace for anyone with a computer background). I can't really stress enough how awesome having a useful amount of resolution real estate is.
• The Milestone runs on the HSPA+ network, making it a 3.5G device. In the real world, this translates to me being able to chat via Skype over the data connection. Sure, it drops a few words every few minutes but by far and large, conversations can be had.
• Non-gimmicky wifi. The transition between the data connection and the wifi (802.11b/g with n-spec being available when Android 2.2 rolls around) is exceptionally seamless. The device does the swich intelligently. I should note that for fringe scenarios i.e., I'm in my car about to pull out (and away from the wifi), there is just enough of a wifi connection that the phone stays in wifi mode but in all practicality, there isnt enough signal strength for that connection to be meaningful -- I wish it would give the option to switch to the then-faster data connection.
• The 16GB SDHC storage. While I'm not one to put music, video, games etc on my phone (I have dedicated devices for those things), being able to use my phone as a hack USB key is exceptionally handy. The slot comes ready for 32GB SDHC memory as well.
• The dedicated "portals". This might be a Motorola specific feature, but it's absolutely wonderful. When you connect the phone into one of the available docks, it automagically switches to the custom homescreen for that dock. In the link, the top example is the when the phone is plugged into the car dock and the bottom is when it is plugged into the multimedia dock. I think the determination is via rfid but I'm not entirely sure. In either case, it's absolutely awesome (the multimedia makes charging the phone a snap)
• I cant write enough about the sheer capability of the phone/OS with regards to "daily use". All this is with just the base operating system and included applications. When you consider additional apps, I can't begin to describe all the things the phone could do. Sure the iPhone has a metric crapton more apps than is available for Android but the iPhone was an inheirently inferior platform (from a hardware and OS standpoint) to begin with so I imagine many of the useful (i.e., non games/trivialties) apps are there to add 'common sense' functionality to the platform. Mind you, when I bought the Milestone, the latest Apple product was the 3GS and while I think the 4th generation iPhone has caught up hardware-wise, the OS is still much more restrictive.
• Being able to use the data connection while talking on the phone is absolutely wonderful. It was something I couldn't do with the Diamond and surprisingly enough, I use this functionality often enough (i.e., reading a briefing email while on the phone with someone etc). It's fantastic.
• Google contacts are so awesome. I can create a contact for, say, Facebook Notifications and have all the "phone numbers" that Facebook uses to send you text messages assigned to this one contact (so the message appears as "Facebook Notification" rather than a garble of numbers).
• There is a proper clippy-holster!!! I've not had a proper clipholster since I used by Q9c -- one that you could pop the phone off reliably with one hand in <½sec. Mind you I broke mine (sat on it :P). It's definitely not as good as the one for the Q9c but it's the first decent holster I've seen/used in long time.

Minor gripes

• The physical keyboard. While I've had the chance to adapt to touch screen keyboards, my girlfriend hasn't quite had the day-in-day-out exposure I have: having that physical keyboard is a good migration tool for me. However, truthfully, the touch keyboard is utter crap. Not a fault with the Motorola product but the complaint is directed at all physical keyboards on smartphones. There's no value to having a physical keyboard if all the keys are the same size and have no useful amount of travel (the travel i.e., the physical displacement that occurs when the button is pressed is ~1mm). In all practicality, having the physical keyboard is great as more of a nanny-migration bonus (sort of like how the Touch Diamond had a styus) but I've never really used the physical key.
• Not being able to swap out the memory card without popping the battery is kind of dumb. I imagine there is a sensical technical reason for this restriction (akin to removing a drive while it's in use... even though the phone functions fine without the memory card). This is really more of an annoyance than anything.
• The boot time. It's horrendous. I don't want to time my boot time because once I know, I'll be sitting there counting the seconds that go by (yeah, I have such a hard life :P). Without the memory card, I'd say it's about 15 seconds and with the memory card, probably 20 seconds. Really just an annoyance -- but in my (spoiled perhaps) world, anything taking more than 15seconds better come with multiple cores, a crapton of RAM and a dedicated videocard ;)
• The Googleification of everything. While the tight integration is very nice and there are some features I really like, the fact that the phone/OS doesnt readily work with Outlook (the de-facto leader) is kind of dissapointing. In fact, you cant really get your contacts to sync with Outlook (that I know of) - you have to convert your Outlook contacts into Google contacts (not that it's necessarily a bad thing).
• The phone comes with up to nine homescreens (the original 2.0 Android only had three) and while that's enough for me to get all the shortcuts and widgets I need, it might not be enough for everyone. I dont see why you cant raise the limit to "unlimited".
• There are "live wallpapers" which for the most part are just animated backgrounds but some of them are pretty nifty, like the one for Google Maps that updates the map based on where the GPS says you are. Gimmicky yes but definitely cool.
• While the OS supports Flash, it doesnt really as you can't visit Flash enabled sites (youtube is done via something separate) and when you go to install Flash, Adobe tells you that it cant install for your browser.
• Motorola has since switched to the micro-USB connector (same as for their RAZR2 and their H12 headsets) which means it's more of a pain in the butt to plug in (but the multimedia dock thankfully removes that hassle so really it's just the car kit that's a pain for me). This is kind of sad as one of the reasons I like/liked Motorola so much in the past was their use of the standard mini-USB connector.

Serious Aggravations

• The light proximity sensor (LPS). This is one case where the Windows Mobile phone had it way better. How the LPS works is by having a light sensor near the top of the phone (where you would put your heard if you were not using BlueTooth). When there isnt very much light (i.e., you might have the phone to your head), it turns the screen off (presumably to save battery). It magically turns the screen back on when there is more light (presumably, the only reason you would have more light is because you moved the phone from your head -- and the only reason you would do that during a phone call is to look at something etc). This is all fine and dandy. There are scenarios (thankfully not often) where, the phone, for lack of a better word teases me. This is how it goes down:
  
  1. I move the phone from my head, the screen switches to screen-on
  2. Before I can do anything, it switches to screen-off
  3. I press the power button
  4. It turns the screen on
  5. Go to Step 2
  The only way to get the screen to stay on is to activate the slider on the phone (and since they removed the slider on the successor to this phone, I hope to god they fixed this!). The Diamond had this perfected. The power button turns the screen on or off as an override (i.e., when you turn it on, it turns on ... the power savings countdown might be activated but you had at least 30seconds of inactivity before the screen shutoff -- with the Milestone, I have less than 1 second of activity or inactivity before the screen shuts off). Sure there are apps to force the screen on while I'm on the phone -- but this would then apply to all my phone calls and not just the every-so-often-when-I-want-to-look-something-up.
• Speaking of power buttons, the slider is ridiculous. I think all the iPhone users ruined it for the rest of us (and again the Touch Diamond got this dead on). When you press the power button (to turn the screen back on), you should be able to use the phone -- not have to do a "slide to unlock" gimmick (because really, if I didnt want to turn the screen on, I wouldnt have pressed the button). Sure if the power button is dead smack in the middle of the phone I could the argument for the slide to unlock gimmick (although the Milestone does have a bit more tolerance since it can be unlocked via the slider function) but the power button is a pain in the butt the press. Realistically this should be a user customizeable option that we can opt out of without having to use 3rd party apps. Unfortunately, it seems that Android 2.2 is removing the ability to bypass the lockscreen. Ugh.
• Again, with the buttons... the camera button takes forever to activate (presumably to prevent accidentally switching into camera mode). You pretty much have to hold the button down for about 3 seconds (until you hear the beep and the wirring of the camera bits). Often, its faster to navigate to the widget/application directly. Honestly, the phone would be so much better without the camera button

Lastly, the multitasking on the phone is awesome. It's great that the task manager magically handles the running tasks to balance my intents and battery life. For the most part, it gets the intent right however I wish it would ship with a task manager of some sort so we wouldnt have to rely on 3rd party apps for this basic functionality. The other aggravation of multitasking is working with the "back" and "home" buttons. When your turn your screen back on (say it went into powersave mode), you are (sometimes) presented with one of the previous applications you were running. Now, to get to the homescreen (where you have a good chance of wanting to go) you can either click the home button or press the back button (which should hide the current window).

The catch is that the home screen button takes about 2seconds to trigger and in that time you could have pressed the back button five times. This is where the multittasking comes back to bite you. If Android has more than 5 screens worth of stuff to toggle through .. because although you would think that when you go "back" from the current application it takes you to the home screen ... no, it takes you to the next application on the stack ... and the next after that ... and the next after that. Sure, you eventually get to the home screen, but if you have more than 5 screens worth of stuff, you're faster with the home button. Mind you there's no way to know how many apps are running because the mechanics of the task manager are hidden away. Bah.

Closing
Am I happy with this phone? Definitely. Am I impressed with Android? Definitely (although I wish to hell they'd have some form of backward/forward compatability plan and that they'd let us upgrade/downgrade the phone's OS just like we do for our computers). Would I reccomend anyone fork over the $700 price tag for one? Not a chance. For most people the older Android 1.6 found on some of the HTCs is plenty enough (HTC adds tons of their own brilliant UI innovations as well). If you absolutely must have the flagship, then at least I would strongly advise getting a plan/discount of some sort to help with the price tag. Final verdict: 9/10. This would have scored  9.5 but too many OS gripes to ignore.