I am now the proud and pleased owner of a Motorola Milestone. First things first. In America it is called the Droid, which is such a cool name. Why oh why did they change it to Milestone for Europe? (Ed – They licensed the name from Lucasfilm in USA)
I changed from a HTC Hero as my priorities have changed. I now need a phone that is good for work. The Hero is a great phone but a touchscreen is hell for texting and emailing a lot. I needed a hard keyboard and, being a fan of Android this was the natural choice. Continue reading below…
Out of the box
This feels like a premium phone. It is weighty and balanced in the palm. The top has the power button and 3.5 mm jack, the ft side the mini USB charging port and on the right is a volume rocker at the top and a hard key for the camera at the bottom. On the front there are four soft keys, left to right: Back, Menu, Home and Search. Turn the phone 90 degrees left and the screen pushes up the reveal the keyboard. The keyboard snaps in to place with a satisfying click and the screen flips in to landscape mode. The transition in to landscape mode and then back in to portrait mode is smooth and snappy, and when an application is open the phone will change orientation when the phone is turned, iPhone style, without having to slide out the keyboard. The screen is beautiful, pin sharp and bright with very full colours. I was genuinely surprised by that, when I switched on it was so bright and clear.
The phone runs Android 2.1. The software runs smooth and very fast. Windows open promptly, scrolling is smooth and applications switch between each other well. There is no lag between app switching and the processor has yet to slip up for me, two weeks so far. Like any multitasking phone you’ll need a task manager – I recommend the free version of Taskiller – too many apps open means the phone slows down but that’s to be expected. Just remember to kill open apps that are not used. For ones you wish to never kill there is an ignore list in Taskiller.
The phone is great for media. Photos and video look great on the screen and it has a built in speaker that is by far the loudest I have ever heard on a phone. There were certain podcasts that I always struggled to hear on speaker, but no longer. his is very, very loud. I use my phone for media all the time. I have a Spotify library that, if I downloadeded it all, would push a terabyte, I listen to podcasts all the time, watch TV using the Android iPlayer app, Beebplayer, I regularly use train journeys to catch up on TV like The Wonders of the Solar System. This phone delivers with a great picture, crystal clear sound and completely bug-free playback. Like every phone and music player I have ever had, the bundled headphones are crap. Get some good noise canceling earbuds.
The biggest surprise this phone brings is the camera. It is, frankly, the best phone camera I have ever used. I have a Sony Cybershot 8MP camera, and aside from the 5MP resolution on this phone, it is every bit a match for it. It has a twin LED flash and the pictures are crisp, bright and clear. The colours are live and vibrant, which is the best feature. Every phone camera I have ever used produced washed out photos which were only good for messing about on Facebook really. Not so the Droid. The photographs produced here are very, very good. Naturally photography buffs will always use their top of the range cameras, but for family snapping and personal use this will replace any camera you have and you’ll be very pleased with the results. Here are some pics I have taken with it:
Uploading to online hosting is seamless and the HSDPA/3G connection on this is the fastest I have ever used. 5 megapixel snaps upload in 10-15 seconds. So far I have uploaded to Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook and the excellent Photoshop, which has an excellent application for editing and managing, I recommend this. It’s 2 GB free storage with paid upgrades at very good prices, plus it links to the three aforementioned hosts so it manages all your pics online, wherever they are. There is a desktop app for your PC which syncs everything across all your devices. My only complaint is that the online account runs using Flash and it takes ages to load. This doesn’t affect the phone though. I’ve dumped Mobile Me in favour of Photoshop.
Shooting video produces very good quality footage, although be wary that filming whilst using the LEDs in dark conditions will sap the battery. It films up to HD quality so uploading to YouTube is usually a WiFi only thing. I made a 60 second video and it was 19 megabytes so I don’t mind WiFi uploads, since one or two videos would soon eat that data allowance. You can set defaults for the film quality if you want to produce smaller videos.
Contacts will sync with multiple accounts, so your Google contacts stored on the cloud can be synced with Facebook, which is nice as it pulls their photos to the phone, also Last FM friends, Flickr friends, basically any account that supports contacts sync can be configured to work with it. Multiple Google accounts are allowed and corporate accounts can be added for work – very useful. I use Google services for my work IT so this isn’t distinction isn’t necessary for me, but it’s a great addition as the phone can be used for work and personal but still keep the two separate. It even has two calendar apps, one personal and one corporate. For things like notifications they function as one, but the data never mixes meaning that if you leave your job your personal data remains intact, or, for an employer, if an employee leaves you can zap the work-sensitive data without bricking the phone, and you don’t affect the employee’s personal data. Brilliant. I am self-employed and can see the huge benefits here.
I live out of my phone. If I didn’t have calendar, tasks and corporate functions I would be stuck carrying a diary around. This phone is the best at data management I have come across. iPhone doesn’t even touch it, nowhere near. Having the free Google web infrastructure means that I am able to subcontract my company IT stuff to them for free. I know they get my company information for use in advertising but that’s a small price to pay for the use of their data centres. If anyone out there does want to set up their own business, do not waste money on IT. Learn to use Google’s services. You’ll get a comprehensive 24/7 IT department for free. All you need is a phone and a netbook/laptop. This is where Google massively threatens iPhone and Blackberry. It does everything that they charge for, it does it superbly and it does it for free. This phone accesses the cloud and Google services and integrates perfectly. You don’t notice when you’re using the phone or when you’re using web-based stuff. This technology is still in it’s infancy so remember where you heard this first: in a year or so the IT world will be unrecognisable as it was. No more massive hard drives, USB sticks etc except for data transfer on an industrial scale. They’re pointless. Google is betting big on the cloud and it looks like it’s about to go crazy. As soon as web connections allow streaming of high-yield media and data, such as films etc, in the same way it does for music now, then the devices in your pocket will go from needing large memory as a standard to needing a fast connection and top class CPU. Everything will go online. I use the cloud now and I can see it so clearly. Everything except for video I now get online. Anyone using YouTube will have noticed more and more premium and professional content appearing on there so it’s coming. I think Apple might be in real trouble here if they don’t adapt. Once streaming abolishes downloading then the winner will be the one offering the best-connected devices and Google wins hands down here and now with that.
Camera sample images (click thumbnail for full size picture):
