Motorola Milestone 2 review

The Milestone 2 is simply an upgrade of the original. It’s a bit of a brick, but its feature list is impressive: a 480×854 screen, 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, QWERTY keyboard, 8GB of internal storage and a 1GHz processor. It’s not currently available on contract direct from the major network operators: you can either find a contract through a third-party dealer such as www.best-mobile-contracts.co.uk, or buy it SIM-free.

While most flagship phones now have a dual-core processor, the Milestone 2’s single-core Cortex A-8 is still powerful. Although our tests showed it to be roughly as fast as LG’s Optimus Black, we found it could become unresponsive with a few apps open. Installing a Task Killer is a good idea.

Similarly, the Milestone 2’s 5-megapixel camera isn’t as good as the latest 8-megapixel snappers, but it takes crisp and colourful snaps. As with most phone cameras, dark areas tend to suffer from noise. It can also capture video at 720p quality, which is more than good enough for YouTube – again, videos are a bit noisy, but colours are strong.

Battery life in our light-usage test was great, lasting for almost two days. This is unusual for an Android smartphone and almost as good as Apple’s iPhone 4. With battery management software, you should be able to go without a charge for a couple of days, although this is heavily dependent on your usage of 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi.

The Milestone 2’s 3.7in screen is clear and colourful, and the capacitive touch interface is smooth and responsive. More importantly, Motorola’s clear and well-designed interface makes the phone a pleasure to use. Icons are detailed and memorable, widgets are useful and make efficient use of the screen space, and when you scroll through home screens, a handy bar pops up to show you which screen you’re on.