Motorola Milestone 2 review (old)

This is a repost of an old Google+ post I made in August 2011 (to see how well Google+ could be used as a blog).  I have NOT updated it in anyway, so it's mainly for historical purposes.  Especially BEWARE that I subsequently discovered the Milestone 2's keyboard only lasts about 6 months of non-light usage for many people (including me), so I would recommend the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro instead.


Intro
This is a review of the Motorola Milestone 2 (aka Droid 2) phone, which had a major firmware update a couple of months ago (which fixed many but not all of my complaints). In fact this review was written on it!

My review is written from the perspective of a former Nokia 9500 user (good keyboard, ran Symbian S80) & a former Psion die-hard (great keyboard, ran EPOC aka Symbian for PDAs). However, I will try to avoid talking about Android issues common to many phones (leaving them to a separate "Android review"), and instead focus on aspects unique to the Milestone 2.

My review is also written from the perspective of a UK/European user. I gather that the USA has a much greater choice of keyboarded Android phones, but our choice is very limited.

The Milestone 2 (from now on referred to as the M2) currently runs Android 2.2, although as Motorola (along with many other phone manufacturers) semi recently signed an agreement with Google about keeping their Android phones up-to-date (and now Motorola has now been bought by Google!), I have some hope it will be updated to Android 2.3...

HARDWARE
The M2 seems pretty well built, and I have confidence that it is about as robust as a complex phone this size can be. But if you are prone to dropping your phone, then you may still want to buy a snap-on cover to protect your expensive phone (I found a good one for only £4 (!!) on Amazon, although it prevents using it with a Car Dock, and is so hard to remove that you will probably break the keyboard slider mechanism if you try).

The touch screen is supposed to use Gorilla Glass, so it should be a little more damage resistant than on some other phones. The screen's brightness automatically adjusts to how bright the surroundings are (unless disabled), and I found this worked very well (and helps save the battery when used indoors). The touch screen's sensitivity seems about right, being neither overly sensitive nor unresponsive, although sometimes I have to clean my sticky fingers before the screen will respond. I do however wish that the screen had the iPhone's oleophobic coating, to reduce greasy finger marks, but that applies to all non-Apple phones.


The small backlit keyboard is revealed by a slider mechanism that feels reassuringly solid. It didn't take me long before I was very comfortable typing on it... but make sure you turn off the VERY stupid Auto-correct options, or you will constantly think you have mis-typed a word (when actually the phone changed it). No doubt this feature is useful for the on-screen keyboard (that I essentially never use), but the real keyboard is accurate enough to never need it. Despite it's small size, I have found the keyboard wonderful to use - it seems almost as good as the (much larger) one on my old Nokia 9500.

The main downside is that there is no dedicated row of number keys, such that you have to press Alt or Alt Lock to get numbers from the top row of letter keys. Surprisingly this works very well, and I now rarely find myself wishing for an extra row of keys. Alt Lock works great for entering large blocks of numbers, with the only bad point being that you have to leave Alt mode to enter a decimal point (how on earth did they miss that?!?). You can set a double-space to automatically be turned into a dot (followed by a space) but that then means pressing delete afterwards to get rid of the space.

Also, the Shift & Alt keys don't seem to reliably be "sticky" (where "sticky" means the Shift/Alt key doesn't need to be held down at the same time as the key press). And the Alt Lock key doesn't work in some (usually third-party) apps, but this may be a limitation of Android itself (rather than bad programming on Motorola's part).

Despite my moans, it is still one of the best Android keyboards available; keys are easy to identify by touch, and have good 'clicky' feedback (both feel & sound). As with other Android phones, the small size means you will always be "thumb typing".


Battery life is probably typical for a powerful Android phone, which means it will struggle to last a whole day if you use it heavily (i.e. a few hours combined use, depending on usage), unlike my old Nokia 9500. This means that in my pocket I now have a separate small MicroUSB battery (made by Kensington), which I can use to charge my phone in emergencies. WiFi does NOT seem to use much battery power, where-as it does on the HTC Desire Z. Something which MAY be unusual for Android phones is that GPS mapping apps (like Google Maps & Copilot Live) seem to kill the battery very quickly, so don't plan on using it away from the car (charger). Maybe using wifi & phone signals would reduce battery usage, but I don't like Google knowing where I am at all times...

Talking of GPS, I am usually stunned by how quickly the Assisted-GPS gets a lock (typically a few seconds) no matter the conditions, and sometimes even inside buildings! Seems much better & more reliable than other Android phones I have seen (inc the HTC Desire Z). But if you don't have a data connection (unlikely but possible) then it will take the usual few minutes to get an unassisted lock.

Sound seems loud enough (both headphones & speaker), and call quality seems fine for both parties (at least since the firmware update). While I am not one to ask about sound quality, it seems pretty good to me. There is supposed to be noise-cancelling for hands-free calls, but I can't say how well it works. I have had problems with 3.5" headphones (NOT headsets!) randomly pausing music & trying to make calls. By the way, the M2 obviously supports high-quality music-only Bluetooth audio.

I am not a camera fan, but I didn't notice any problems with the built-in 5MP camera (although surely anything is better than my old Nokia 9500's fuzzy 0.3MP camera!).

I highly recommend the official Motorola Car Dock (attaches to the windscreen) which works brilliantly, and you can even slide the keyboard open if you want. OTOH, do NOT buy an Expansys Desktop Dock as the phone goes in & out of dock mode at random (causing all sorts of problems). This seems to be a problem with most non-official Desktop Docks, due to incorrect placement of a magnet that the M2 uses to detect when it is in the Dock. So only buy Motorola Docks (for car or desk).

My M2 came bundled with an 8GB MicroUSB card (early reviews said 4GB), a nice pair of wired headphones (with microphone pick-up & call answer button), a USB data/charger cable, and USB socket in a mains plug (in case you don't have a PC handy).

Leaving my Noka 9500 (with it's awesome transflective LCD screen) for the Milestone 2 (with it's standard back-lit LCD screen), I was worried that it's screen would not be readable outside. This worry proved to be entirely unfounded, as the phone will detect I am using it outside & after a short delay (about one second) the screen brightness will be automatically increased. Of course this will eat the battery quicker, so outside usage is still something you want to minimise.

I should also mention that I have very occasionally found the Milestone 2's battery seem to run out very quickly, despite no obvious sign of any apps heavily using the CPU. Rebooting it (power off then on) fixed this. I cannot say whether this was Motorola's fault, or one of the apps I have installed. It's NOT a frequent reoccurring problem, so you don't need to worry - I only mention it in case you ever run into a similar problem.

On the plus side, I continue to be pleasantly surprised at how quickly Android (on my 1GHz Milestone 2 anyway) boots after being completely switched off. It only feels like a few seconds (certainly well under a minute), where-as the Nokia 9500 would literally take 5-10 minutes to finish.

I am also pleasantly surprised at how little the battery gets used overnight (about 10%), if I leave the phone in "Flight mode" (where Mobile & Wifi usage is turned off). This manages to about equal the Nokia 9500, which is quite an achievement considering how frugal Symbian was.

In summary, the M2's hardware is fantastic & seems robust. It probably beats all other keyboarded Android phones currently available. It is as good as (if not better) than anything Nokia ever made! Motorola did a great job here.

SOFTWARE
The software side is more of a mixed bag. Motorola's "MotoBlur" adaption of Android got heavily panned for being too slow in pre-release reviews of the M2, but I think this was before they had finished optimising the software. That isn't to say it is perfectly smooth (even after the firmware update), but in general I think it is acceptable.


MotoBlur's good points include a lot of additional functionality that doesn't come as standard (some not even in the HTC Desire Z). For example:

* The Motorola Task Manager means you can't accidentally stop Android working properly, because unlike Task Managers from the Android Market, it won't allow you to kill Motorola-specific tasks/services (and in fact won't even show them by default).

* The music player has quite a few nice features probably lacking from the standard one, although it still misses some things I'd like, so you may end-up getting one from the Google Market. For example, Playlist generation is virtually missing, so I had to install the free My Playlist Maker 2 app. Note that the manual documents you can search your music, but I have never gotten this to work, and so have reported this as a bug to Motorola (but their reply was not encouraging).

* It comes with Quick Office, which is no-doubt good if you need that kind of thing. My main use of this is the PDF viewer, which seems fast & works well... although for one complex PDF that it struggled with, I found the official Adobe Reader much faster.

* The Car Dock mode is pretty good.

* There is support for Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, etc although I don't use these so can't really comment. Apart from various widgets for the Home screen, the Contacts app is suppose to automatically combine people on your Google Contacts with the same people on Facebook/etc (I read someone say it was fairly good at this). Beware that those internet-enabled Home screen widgets may drain the battery fast, so you may end-up removing them (I certainly did!).

* The web browser has been enhanced with an iTunes-esque scrollable bookmarks facility. Not sure whether this is actually an improvement or not, but it is pretty & fluid. In the end I have disabled bookmark thumbnails, in favour of text-only bookmarks, so that I can see more on screen & more quickly identify them.

* The MotoBlur account you have to create means you can remotely locate your phone using GPS, and even remotely wipe it. Never tried either of these features though.


OK, enough good points. Why might you decide against getting an M2, despite it's many plus points?

* A few MotoBlur things are NOT fluid, despite the 1GHz processor. The obvious one is browsing your pictures using the Gallery app - it's not unusuable, but scrolling through the pictures isn't as smooth as it should be.

The phone does occasionally grind to a halt, when it is does a full synchronisation with Google a few times a day (you see a little symbol in the status bar), which can be frustrating, so I have learnt to wait for this to finish (maybe 30 seconds) before doing anything. Not sure if this is a general Android problem, or only specific to the M2, but it does seem stupid on a such a powerful phone with proper multitasking.

* MotoBlur's "Android skin" is slightly inconsistent. Mainly the GMail app has rather dark grey buttons, while the rest of the phone has light grey buttons. You may also occasionally notice a highlight is (standard Android) bright orange rather than MotoBlur's bright red. This doesn't bother me, and in general I like MotoBlur's skin, but artistic perfectionists may not.

* While I have 16GB Class 4 MicroSD card working fine, before the firmware update I (like many others) found the phone would randomly freeze when using a high-speed card (I ran into problems with a Class 10). I HAVE NOT YET TESTED whether this is fixed by the firmware update.

* Despite the firmware update, it is still not completely stable (I have occasionally gotten a spontaneous reboot, or otherwise had to reboot it because of some problem). Although I hear that other Android phones (e.g. the HTC Desire Z) can be afflicted by similar issues. I'm also used to this from my Nokia 9500, so it seems to be an almost unavoidable result of the complexity of modern smartphones (and how they are rushed to market)... but one day I really hope things will improve (like Windows has from crashy 95 to rock-solid 7). I guess the iPhone might be more stable here, because it lacks real (user) multi-tasking.

My own experience of Motorola's "MotoBlur" adaption of Android suggests that you should wait until 6 months after a Motorola phone is released (in the UK anyway), because it seems it takes them that long to work out most of the bugs & performance issues. This isn't doing their reputation any good, and explains the "vanilla Android not MotoBlur" campaign by some people.

* Netgear DG834G v5 owners BEWARE that the M2 has serious wifi problems with that particular router: After about 1 day the M2 refuses to connect wirelessly to the Netgear. Rebooting the M2 makes no difference, the only solution is to reboot the router! I have had no such problems with any other device (inc my aging Nokia 9500), so I believe this is Motorola's fault. The M2 certainly did have many wifi issues before the firmware update, and it seems this particular one was missed.

Now, let me be clear, this does not happen with any other routers (not even earlier versions of the DG834G), as far as I know, and as far as Motorola's tech support is aware.  EDIT: I discovered that this affects many Android devices, so it is actually Netgear's fault.

SUMMARY
None of the M2's software issues is particularly problematic for me, the M2 does provide some nice software on top of the standard Android stuff, and it has absolutely fantastic hardware.

If you are looking for a keyboarded Android phone, then the M2 is probably the best one currently available.