Motorola MILESTONE 2 review: Landmark droid

Motorola MILESTONE 2 retail package

The Motorola MILESTONE 2 comes in box with the usual accessories – a charger, a microUSB cable to be used for both data connections and charging and a one-piece headset. There’s an 8GB microSD card too, which tops the 8GB of built-in memory for a total of 16GB of storage right out of the box.

Except, that’s not quite right – what we found out after a bit of head-scratching was that the 8GB of inbuilt memory is for apps only, not available to store photos, music or anything else. Just who would fill all that space with apps is beyond us.

So don’t get fooled by vague marketing, the supplied 8GB microSD card is all the storage you get for general purposes.

The Motorola MILESTONE 2 retail package

Motorola MILESTONE 2 360-degree spin

At 116.3 x 60.5 x 13.7 mm the Motorola MILESTONE 2 is by all means not small or compact but the available space is well used. The 3.7” FWVGA screen and the four-row QWERTY make for most of the front surface area.

The MILESTONE 2 weighs 169 grams and that’s about fair for such a device. In fact, given the solidly built metallic body and the good balance, that heft is welcome.

Display and keyboard

The 3.7” display dominates the MILESTONE 2 front when the slider is closed. The capacitive touchscreen has the highest resolution currently available on a droid phone - 854 x 480 pixels. The sensitivity of the display is top notch but that is to be expected in a capacitive unit.

The MILESTONE 2 display

The screen’s image quality is also great with deep blacks (although no AMOLED deep) and good maximum brightness. Viewing angles are excellent.

The sunlight legibility is the only downside of the display – it’s quite reflective and at some of the angles the reflected light completely obscures the image on the screen.

Opening the slider reveals the comfortable four-row QWERTY keyboard. The keys are big and bulging in the center making touch typing easier. The backlighting is strong and even.

The pretty comfortable keyboard scores another point for the MILESTONE2

Aside from the usual keys, the Motorola MILESTONE 2 keyboard packs some Android shortcuts (OK, back and search keys) plus a shortcut key that activates the voice command.

The D-pad on the keyboard is gone, replaced by the more space efficient but just as usable arrow keys. The special keys have expanded to make them easier to use – the Enter, Shift and Alt keys are double the length of the other keys.

Speaking of special keys, the Alt Lock key will come in handy when entering numbers. This partially fixes the problem of each key having to house two symbols.

The backlight is strong and even

Also, the numbers are placed at the top row of the keyboard, which might be a little cramped for people with big fingers. Typical for Android messengers, a press-and-hold of the Menu key shows the available keyboard shortcuts: Menu + s for Search, Menu + p for Settings, Menu + n for Notifications, to name a few.