Motorola Milestone (Droid) review

Motorola’s Milestone (also known in some circles as the Droid), is one of the most hotly anticipated smartphones of recent times. The hysteria focuses mainly around the fact that it’s the first phone with Google’s new Android 2.0 OS, and this brings a number of key improvements.

Most significant among the improvements is free voice-guided satnav, via the upcoming Google Maps Navigation. Alas, at the time of writing, our review model didn’t have this on board – its not due for its UK release for a few weeks yet – so we couldn’t test it out, but if reports on the web are anything to go by, it’s a free extra well worth having.

Android 2.0 also brings with it voice search – tap a button next to the Google search box on the home screen, say what you want to look for, and the phone runs a Google search for you. It’s remarkably accurate considering you don’t need to train it, and it works surprisingly well. As long as you don’t mind looking a bit deranged, shouting random keywords into your phone on street corners, it offers a quick alternative to typing on screen or using the Milestone’s slide-out physical keyboard.

That’s not all, though. A number of other tweaks include a unified inbox for Exchange, Gmail and other third party email accounts, plus an all-in-one contacts view. You can now add multiple Gmail accounts instead of the single account of previous versions, and this version of Android now supports multitouch natively. The Milestone takes advantage of this by offering pinch zoom gestures in the browser and image editing applications.

Alas, as with so many bleeding edge devices, Motorola leans far too heavily on the new release of Android, and improves little else. Where other manufacturers add extra desktop space, the Milestone is limited to the standard three screens, and there’s not even any extra software of note. We expected Motorola to include Motoblur – a social networking aggregation tool included on its other Android phone, the DEXT – but there’s no sign of any addition.