Motorola Milestone 2

The Motorola Milestone 2 is a tad late to the party: its US equivalent, the Droid 2, has been on sale since the Summer, and Android 2.3‘s release is just around the corner. But it’s still one of the only Android phones you can buy with a bona fide slide out physical keyboard, and if that’s a necessity for you, still very much worth a look. Read on to find out why here in our full Motorola Milestone 2 review. The Motorola Milestone 2 feels like a truly functional smartphone. Unibody aluminium cases and HDMI ports be damned: everything about the build of this handset is geared towards Getting Things Done. It’s a shame then that Motorola went and spoiled things by gimping it with its Motoblur software skin.

Build

Bar a colour change and key rearrangement, the Motorola Milestone 2 is almost identical to the original 2009 Motorola Milestone. It’s handsome, rather than beautiful, and its plastic casing is sturdy rather than sexy. On the plus side, it still manages to feel much thinner than the similarly designed HTC Desire Z – at 60.5×116.3×13.7mm, pocket space isn’t an issue, and we’re still impressed Motorola has squeezed so much in (8GB of internal storage too) when there’s a whole keyboard to stuff into those dimensions too. The slide mechanism on the Motorola Milestone 2 is nothing to get Nokia worried, but it’s sturdy enough to assure us it can survive the wear and tear of a two year contract. It’s possible to raise the screen halfway up and leave it there, but it won’t happen by accident in your pocket, and more to the point, at least the screen never dangles like the one on arced hinges does on the HTC Desire Z.

One reader asked about GPS performance on the Motorola Milestone 2: we never had any problems grabbing our locale, and it worked seamlessly with Google Maps Navigation on a route through London we regularly make that not all Android phones have kept their signal throughout. But WiFi reception was ever so slightly flaky, and we struggled to get online through our router two floors down as we can with other smartphones.

Keyboard

Android veterans may recall that the original Milestone was hampered by its unique selling point – the slide out keyboard had keys so flat, it was almost impossible to press any of them. The Motorola Milestone 2 fixes this: the keys are raised, separated, and with a bit of practice, easy to pick up quite a speed on, certainly more so than on the HTC Desire Z. Motorola has also managed to fit in a useful Alt lock key, which is useful for typing in numbers. The strange trackpad has also gone, in place of smaller, just as effective directional keys. Unfortunately, the OK button doesn’t act as a Go option when typing in search queries or web URLs, which takes a bit of getting used to, but as far as high end Android keyboards go, it’s still the best game in town.

Screen

he screen on the Motorola Milestone 2 isn’t anything to write home about compared to the Super AMOLED panels and Retina Displays out there now. It’s a 3.7-inch FWVGA (480×854) TFT screen almost identical to the one found on the Milestone a year ago. Viewing angles are limited by the glass reflection more than anything else, but it’s never visibly disappointing as the display on the HTC HD7. It is also very responsive however, something you’ll notice using the stunning onscreen keyboard.

Android 2.2. and Motoblur

The Motorola Milestone 2′s predecessor was the first to run Android 2.0, and we heaped praise on it simply for running Android as Google intended, with no pointless software skin. Unfortunately, somewhere in between, Motorola decided to shovel its own skin, Motoblur, onboard all its phones. Bad Moto!

ou see, all Motoblur really does is add custom Facebook and Twitter widgets (And MySpace amongst others, but let’s face it, even MySpace doesn’t use MySpace anym0re), which aren’t as good as using the free Facebook and Twitter Android apps and their accompanying widgets. For one, they’re noticeably slower, and instead of getting a nice notification when you get a message directed at you on Twitter, for instance, you get one telling you you have several thousand, which is all the tweets in your stream. Why Moto? You’re just wasting battery life.

Other elements of Motoblur also prove irksome: a little pop up menu shows up for a few seconds when you swipe through the homescreens indicating which one you’re on. But it then stops you from accessing the settings menu for a few seconds while you wait for it to go away.

This pop up screen blocks access to the settings menu for a few seconds and is very annoying.

And more to the point, Android software skins are just bad news simply because they inevitably add to update delays (The original Milestone’s Android 2.2 update is still MIA). Motoblur doesn’t seem to be very efficient either – despite the 1GHz CPU under the bonnet it’s just not very fast. You can see the screen lag as you swipe to unlock the screen or roll through menus, which is a tad disappointing – most apps do run flawlessly once up and running however.

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We should spare a minute to highlight the one blessing of Motoblur though: Moto’s excellent on screen keyboard. You can access this in portrait or landscape when the keyboard is shut, and it’s incredibly responsive and accurate. We’d go so far as to say it’s the best Android keyboard out there, even if it isn’t quite as effective as the soft keyboard found on Windows Phone 7 and Apple’s iOS. Swype is also preloaded, which is always a welcome option to have, especially while it remains in private beta on Android.

We also can’t really complain about Android 2.2′s core features. It really is excellent. Flash 10.1 video streaming performance is arguably the best we’ve seen on any Android phone so far, and you can use the Motorola Milestone 2 as a mobile hotspot straight from the homescreen too. Your best best is to install Launcher Pro for a smoother homescreen immediately – though it won’t remove the irritation of Motoblur account syncing.

Call quality and battery life

As a phone for good ol’ fashioned voice called, the the Motorola Milestone 2 raises no issues. Battery life on the Motorola Milestone 2 is solid enough, which comes as a bit of a relief after the pathetic HTC Desire HD runtime away from the mains. The 1400mAh capacity battery is enough to get you through a day of fairly heavy use, mixing up calls, notifications, music playback and casual web browsing.

Call quality was noticeably excellent too: conversations sound crisp when the Motorola Milestone 2 is held to your ear, though the loudspeaker can be a bit raspy.

Camera

The camera is average, and slow to load too

Don’t buy the the Motorola Milestone 2 for its dual flash five megapixel camera. It’s pretty washy, flat and mediocre, and the 720p HD video isn’t a market leader. As you can see in the clip below, it’s actually very smooth, but devoid of accurate colour. You see the parakeets in the tree at the end of the clip? They’re bright green in real life, not that you’d ever know it from watching this. But it’ll do in a pinch, and the results are still more than usable for capturing life’s impromptu moments.

Verdict

If a physical QWERTY keyboard is a dealbreaker for you, we’d certainly opt for this over the HTC Desire Z. It’s just much more robust. Unfortunately, it’s hard to recommend the Motorola Milestone 2 over the very best Android phone contenders sans keyboard, simply because its rendition of Android 2.2 is badly thought out. Compared to HTC Sense or stock Android (the latter very hard to come by these days), Motorola’s skin and widgets are lacking in purpose.

Motorola, stop with this Motoblur nonsense, because it’s the only thing holding you back from greatness.