Apologies for the hiatus. I fully intend to update this blog more now, in fact there are big changes in the future. Not only do I plan to post more often, but soon I’ll be relocating off of WordPress and on to my very own domain at OnTheWestWind.com. There will also likely be some theme changes and other work in general on the site.
Anyways, on to the review!
Two weeks ago I bought a Motorola Milestone from Telus here in Canada. I should start, in a way, by saying that this is the first smartphone that I’ve had and some of the things in this review are possibly generalized to smartphones and the Android OS. So far it’s been a great experience being on a smartphone in general, but to make things easier let’s break it down into a few sections. Previous to having a Milestone I was using a combination of an LG Shine and an iPod Touch. Read on to find out more…
The Good
Always connected – As I’ve said, this is my first smartphone so I’ve never had such a constant connection to the rest of the world. While I find that I don’t honestly use the internet capability as much as I could (partly for fear of going over my pitifully small bandwidth limit), it’s extremely useful to look up things quickly that I didn’t think to look up before then or reading news from Google Reader to kill some time. One example of usage where it came in very handy was at a store a few days after I bought the phone: I was trying to decide between two beard trimmers that both looked pretty good, but instead of being annoyed at making a choose blindly or waiting to go home and look up reviews I was able to pop over to Amazon, look up reviews for both trimmers and found out quickly that one of them was rated significantly better than the other. While it sounds like a silly example to some, I found it extremely useful and can already think of a great number of other times that similar lookups would come in handy.
Screen – The Milestone has a fantastic screen. It’s 3.7 inches, which is larger than an iPod Touch/iPhone. It also has a 16:9 widescreen size rather than the oddly shaped iPhone screen. But this isn’t the great part, the great part is the resolution. It’s an 800×480 screen which looks amazingly crisp on such a small screen. It’s easy to read text, even at small sizes, and in general it just looks beautiful. On top of that it’s a capacitive touchscreen, which is greatly appreciated compared to most resistive touchscreens.
Browser – The browser is quite impressive. It has all the nice “pinch to zoom” stuff, of course, but in general the experience is pretty good. I can see how a few interface tweaks would help, though.
Exchange connectivity – I know some people are disappointed with the Exchange support, but it does everything that I want. Excellent push email, meeting scheduling, calendaring, and corporate contact lists all work great. And the separation between email accounts is excellent. It’s easy to select which account you want to edit/read. I have heard that there is a unified inbox feature, but I haven’t found it quite yet. It would be nice, but with the way the notification system works I don’t find it necessary.
Physical keyboard – Touchscreen keyboards can be nice and all, but I find it difficult to type passwords with them because it’s fairly easy for a person looming nearby to tell what you are typing. The keyboard on the Milestone isn’t amazing, but it is the main thing that made this phone the winner between this and the Nexus One (aside from the Nexus One not being available in Canada yet).
External speaker – The Milestone has probably the best speaker I’ve heard on a phone or MP3 player. Heck, it’s even better than the speakers on my LG110X netbook! The volume goes surprisingly high with little distortion. It’s still a single speaker and suffers from all the normal faults of that, but it’s surprisingly loud and clear for the size. Nice work.
Gmail account integration – Up till getting a Milestone I didn’t bother keeping my email contacts in Gmail organized. I could generally remember the addresses and I had other information stored elsewhere. With the Google Account integration, though, this makes the Contacts a fantastic place to store contact information, especially with it’s invisible synchronization between the web and the Milestone. For one thing, I don’t have to worry about doing some annoying backup routine for my contacts if I ever switch to a new Android based phone (and the iPhone too, I believe, now that it has better Google integration as well). The contacts system in Android make it very easy to use all the information when you need to contact someone. It is an excellent jumping point for any type of contact (email, IM, messanging) and while you’re there you might as well store addresses, birthdays, websites, etc. I would like to see a bit more integration with this and the calendar (it should automatically put birthdays on my calendar), but it’s a fantastic thing.
Android Market – This admittedly goes in both the Good and the Annoying. The Market is good because there are a lot of decent free apps and I don’t feel the restrictiveness that is inherent in Apple. I can download non-Market apps and install them quite easily using the SD or find quick links to an app through the bar code blocks that you take a picture of and it looks it up for you automatically.
The Annoying
Android Market – Like all AppStores, the interface is annoying. There doesn’t seem to be an “advanced search” method. There is no way to sort by top rated products. I don’t see an easy way to look through “pay for” products, the focus is so much on free. While I appreciate free, I do want to also see apps that might fulfill a role and determine if it’s worth paying the price. And my biggest annoyance? No non-phone market interface. Sure, the Market site has a few basic Apps listed, but you can’t really do much with it. This is the most absurd thing ever. It would be fantastic if I could do app research and browsing online with my Google account and push it out to my phone rather than using the smaller screen to get all my apps. With a decent web interface you could add so many features that aren’t easily doable with a small screen device. Why has no one done this yet? Arg!
Sound crackling – There is an odd, but known, issue with the Milestone. Whenever you listen to music through the headphone jack there is an occasional pop or crackle. It’s not a sharp sound, thankfully, so while it interrupts the music it doesn’t hurt your ears. The reason this is such a strange issue is that over bluetooth or even out the external speaker the music plays without issues whatsoever. I’m hoping this is a simple firmware fix away as it sounds like it’s a software fault instead of a hardware one. I’m tempted to pick up bluetooth headphones just so I don’t have to listen to it.
Magnets – In an interesting design decision that is becoming more common, the Milestone uses a magnet based system to automatically switch into a docked “clock mode” using a special dock as well as Driving mode when using a car mount. This by itself probably works quite well using those products, but at the same time it causes all sorts of issues with other things, like cases. Unfortunately, the market is heavily laden by magnet clasp cases, so the case that I bought for my Milestone has the odd quirk of temporarily trying to automatically switch the phone into driving mode when I insert or remove the phone. Thankfully, the auto off function makes sure that this doesn’t drain a lot of battery, but it still is very annoying. This is something that should have had a setting somewhere to disable that functionality. Seriously, Motorola, please?
Screen lag – As a former iPod Touch user, I do have to point this out. One thing that Apple did really well on the iPhone/iPod Touch is make things feel extremely responsive. You can feel a real direct connection to where your finger is and what’s going on with the screen. Unfortunately, this is not one of the Milestone or the Android OSs strong points. At first the system felt very laggy. To be honest, it’s probably a very small amount of time because I’ve mostly gotten used to it now, but it’s not as much of a direct response as Apple’s mobile devices have. The 600Mhz Cortex A8 processor just doesn’t handle things as smoothly as it could. I think that’s why so many people are happy with the Google Nexus One which has the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor in it.
From reports online, you can overclock the Verizon Droid (the US version of the Milestone) to 800Mhz and still have it be stable without reducing the battery life too much, but making the interface very smooth. Noone has managed to do the same with Milestone (as far as I’m aware), but I look forward to trying that out and seeing if it does resolve the interface lag. Even if that doesn’t work, there is always hope that Android 2.1 (which should be coming out in the first half of the year for the Milestone) and other future updates will increase the speed. There is already talk of another company that has made their own Dalvik Java base that improves speed drastically so we might see that in the future as well.
The Bad
Battery life – As far as I know, most modern smartphones suffer from this. With fairly light use, my Milestone only lasts a day. Although I haven’t had any heavy use days yet, I suspect that a mid-day battery charge would probably be needed as well. This might become an important factor as I intend to use my phone for reading e-books quite a bit, which I also did on the iPod Touch and rarely had to worry about battery life there.
VPN Issues – For some reason I can’t connect to a basic PPTP VPN. Apparently there is a bug of some sort in the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases that keep PPTP VPNs from working properly, which impedes the utility of this phone for work purposes. I really hope this gets fixed soon. If I used VPN more often this would be a dealbreaker without a doubt.
Conclusion
The Motorola Milestone is a great phone and Android OS is quite an amazing OS. There are still rough edges to both, but I see the Android OS advancing at a much faster pace than the iPhone OS or Palm Pre’s WebOS platform. There are some problems with providers keeping Android up to date with their phones, but it sounds like work is being done to resolve that, which is probably going to be another post. I definitely recommend the Milestone to anyone looking for a smartphone.
And even with a review this long, I feel like there is a lot more I could touch on. I have only had it for two weeks, though. That said, even in that short time I can see it replacing a lot of the functionality I had orginally intended to use my OpenPandora Console for. Too bad that hasn’t come out yet (yes, I know… ridiculously late, isn’t it? That’s yet another post).
