Motorola MILESTONE 2 review: Landmark droid

MOTOBLUR spreads on the gallery too

The Motorola MILESTONE 2 comes with a custom Gallery app (with cool 3D effects, reflections and smooth animations.

The Gallery is split into sections – Camera roll (shows the most recent photos you’ve snapped), Folders (combines all folders from the memory that contain photos or videos), All Photos and All Videos.

The gallery certainly is a looker

Besides the regular view modes, there’s the 3D landscape view.

The smooth animations sure are eye-catching but grid view is much better for browsing a large collection of photos. Turn the phone on its side and it will switch to grid view.

Pinch zooming is also available but you can use double tap too.

The landscape 3D view • Viewing a single photo

The Quick upload and Share features offer quick sharing via MOTOBLUR Share (on Facebook, MySpace, Picasa, Photobucket, etc.) and also Email apps, Bluetooth and MMS.

There are some quick editing tools – rotate, crop, resize and brightness/contras/color controls.

Editing a photo

Mixing social and music

The Music player on the Motorola MILESTONE 2 takes the same approach as the Messaging app – it puts all the music related things in one place.

The Music app • filtering tracks

My Music is the basic music player – it plays songs from your memory card and it can filter tracks by artist, album, playlists and so on. A cool feature automatically pulls album art for the track and – get this – the song lyrics, which are displayed in sync with the song.

This turns the MILESTONE 2 into a mini karaoke (of course, it needs an Internet connection). But there is more. You can select the language of the lyrics – the song’s native language or any other, an awesome feature!

The Motorola MILESTONE 2 music player is a mini karaoke • sending a blip

A tap on the screen reveals the scrubber. You can send a blip – a quick “Love it” or “Hate it” message on Twitter, SMS or email.

Sending a Blip • A map of who’s listening to the same song • Videos for the song

There is another cool option too – you can see who is listening to your current track and where they are around the globe.

Picking a language for the lyrics

The Music Videos section of the Music app offers quick searches on YouTube or GoTV for music videos (what else?). Community taps into the social networks to find you some new music.

Finding music videos is simple

You can view TuneWiki charts, Music Maps (sort of location-aware “currently playing” feature) and HOT Playlists, which show the most popular songs on Facebook or Twitter.

TuneWiki integration • HOT Playlists •

The Motorola MILESTONE 2 comes with a song ID feature, as well – tap the button and in seconds you’ll know the name of the song.

There are still some shortcomings of the music player that need addressing though. The equalizer presets are uncomfortably stored deep in the phone’s setting menu. There are only a handful of preset settings available.

The good thing is there’s a nice selection of effects when the headphones are connected – 3D stereo and three surround settings.

There’s no FM radio in the Motorola MILESTONE 2 – just an Internet radio, but that requires a live internet connection and probably a good data plan, if you listen to it on-the-go.

Pretty good audio quality

The Motorola Mileston3 2 did quite impressively in our audio quality test. As a matter of fact, the handset is certainly among the Top 3 we have tested, when used with an active external amplifier (such as a home or a car stereo). In that scenario the handset is really loud and achieves great readings all over. From signal-to-noise ratio through dynamic range and stereo crosstalk - it's all bordering on perfection.

Unfortunately, the output takes quite a big hit when headphones are connected and the Motorola Milestone 2 gets relegated from a great to a mere decent performer. The stereo crosstalk and loudness suffer the most, but the intermodulation distortion rises significantly too. There are even some deviations in the frequency response, though they are hardly anything to worry about. The result is decent, but far less spectacular output.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:

Motorola Milestone 2 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.