Motorola Milestone

The Milestone 2 and the original Milestone are two peas in a pod, until you push open the slider to reveal the mechanical keyboard which is now a lot more user friendly. Under the hood, the new Milestone 2 also has a faster processor and more memory, but in actual use, this Android 2.2 smartphone still feels a little sluggish.

Design

You'd be hard pressed to find any significant cosmetic changes between the Milestone 2 and the original Milestone. We like the slightly more refined design, rubbery back which provides a nice grip, as well as the gun-metal gray and dark blue combination. The Milestone 2 feels heavy in the hands, but the build quality is exceptional. Our only quibble is that the slider isn't spring-loaded, which means you'll need to manually push it all the way to fully expose the mechanical keyboard.

The Milestone 2 also eschews the directional pad for a set of arrow keys, which frees up space for the rest of the buttons on the QWERTY. The buttons have a slight bump and are a tad too close to each other, but the keyboard is generally still an improvement over the previous implementation.

Features

The Milestone 2 runs on Android 2.2 with a watered down version of MotoBlur. This means you have more control over your home screen and a set of resizable widgets from Motorola. The bottom onscreen navigation switches between indicating which panel you're at and Call/Menu/Contacts options. With Android 2.2, you get features including support for Flash 10.1, wireless Internet tethering, multiple email accounts and social-networking sites. Mum's the word right now on whether the Milestone 2 will get an update to Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

A couple of useful features are Media Share and DLNA connectivity. The former lets you share files between the handset and other devices. So you can, for instance, play a video from your device on a TV, or copy a picture from one handset to another. There's also a Data Manager that tells you how much data you've consumed and also lets you postpone app downloads until you are connected to a Wi-Fi network.

The original Milestone had a 5-megapixel camera, but didn't come with high-definition video capture. The Milestone 2 addresses this with a 1,280 x 720-pixel video recording mode similar to the Milestone XT720. Picture quality was decent although they could be sharper and the camera exposed correctly for our test shots most of the time. Do note that autofocus isn't supported before and during video capture. The Milestone 2 also lacks a front-facing camera for video calls.

Performance

Unlike the original Milestone that comes with a 550MHz processor and 256MB RAM, its upgraded sibling ships with a faster 1GHz TI OMAP chip and twice the memory. According to Quadrant Standard, a benchmark tool for Android devices, the Milestone 2 scored marginally better than the Nexus One running on Android 2.2. In reality, the Milestone 2 just doesn't seem to be performing. It felt sluggish when unlocking the phone onscreen and when scrolling lists.

Call quality was clear and reasonably loud, although it felt like we were speaking in an empty room during some calls. The party on the other line reported the same observation. Battery life was respectable. With two Gmail accounts set to sync automatically, social-networking services Twitter