Motorola Milestone 2 review

Motorola’s Motoblur, like HTC’s Sense, includes cosmetic changes to the operating system as well as software designed to aggregate your contacts, messages and calendars. Once you sign up for it, your preferences are saved in the cloud, making it easier to swap phones in the future. It supports contacts from a wide range of social networking, email and photo sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Last.fm, LinkedIn and Bebo.

Like most manufacturers, however, Motorola’s changes to Android are hit and miss. The expanded Music app is great, with sections for internet radio and music videos. The Clock app has been removed entirely, however, and only replaced by an Alarm & Timer app, and the Gallery app doesn’t pull in photos from Picasa, as the standard Android Gallery does.

The full QWERTY keyboard is an advantage if you don’t like touchscreen keyboards, but it adds weight and thickness, and it’s not the best keyboard we’ve used. The keys are too flat with only a small bump in the centre, and we couldn’t decide whether to use our fingernails or fingertips to press them. The layout is fairly logical, however, and it’s good to have dedicated cursor keys and an “Alt Lock” key for numbers and symbols.

The Milestone 2 might look a little outdated, but it’s still a powerful phone, with a QWERTY keyboard, excellent battery life and good software. It’s available for £340 SIM-free, putting it in the mid-range bracket along with phones such as the LG Optimus Black and Sony Ericsson Xperia arc, neither of which has a physical keyboard. However it misses out on an award due to its poor performance and the average keyboard.