Motorola Milestone home screen

Rebecca was offered to review a Motorola Milestone for a month, but I thought that I would take on the task to put it through some motions, try it out, and give my thoughts on the phone. Being a Blackberry user myself (due to necessity of my day job), I thought I would take the opportunity to try this device out from my perspective while Rebecca already enjoys the touch screen world of the iPhone.

Motorola Milestone, Android, and Telus 3G+ network

For starters, I put this phone to the task on the Telus Mobility 3G+ network, their recently upgraded infrastructure to handle more smartphones like the Milestone. I have no complaints on coverage, speed, or quality while having a one month trial of their voice and data.

Don’t have data service? In a location with wireless internet? The built-in WiFi on the Milestone is very good and gives you just as much functionality with all services on the phone as you do on any cell network.

In all actuality, I put this phone to work during my coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and it certainly passed without any hiccups that were network related. In some aspects, the speed of uploading pictures for posting on Twitter was impressive. With as many people who jammed up the downtown core during the Olympics, I never experienced any issues.

What I liked

Motorola Milestone unlocking method

With any mobile phone, it’s important to keep your cellphone safe from the wrong eyes. So when it comes to locking this phone to prevent access, the unlocking method with this phone is cool. Instead of being numerically based, you draw a pattern on the screen to get into the phone. Very nifty aspect of this Android phone for sure.

Blackberry Curve 8830 next to the Motorola Milestone

On top of that, Google makes Android, so the syncing of your online account with the phone is slick. Once you go through the setup, your contacts, calendar, and GMail account is all there and ready for you. Update your Google calendar on your laptop, it shows up on your phone, and vice versa.

As a Blackberry user that is tethered to a Blackberry Enterprise Server for my day job, I’m used to features like this, but the Milestone is seamless and comfortable. Without getting into a comparison review, this function on my Curve just isn’t as sexy.

GMail on this Milestone is great. I love the way the interface behaves and is quick to understand, but I expect that when Google is behind a device like this.

Motorola Milestone phone interface

The screen on the Milestone is vibrant. It’s bright and detailed with photos, web browsing, and reading text on the screen. Much like the iPhone, multi-touch is in use, so you can zoom in and out on images quickly without too much worry.

Making phone calls on the Motorola Milestone

Making and receiving phone calls are smooth. Put the phone up to your ear and the display dims or shuts off to conserve battery power. And when you answer the phone, the Milestone was quick to start the phone conversation without network burps that cause you to say “hello” two or three times until you can actually start having a conversation.

Finally, the Android Market Place is the BlackBerry App World or iTunes App Store of the Milestone realm, and there are a lot of apps out there. While doing my best to try a lot of them out, you can get overwhelmed by all of the variety. Luckily it’s all sorted by category and includes a great search function, so here’s a few apps that I snagged and put them into full time use.

• Sesmic: This is my Twitter application of choice. I tried Twitroid, but kept coming back to Sesmic due to its ease of use and UI. There are a lot of other apps out there you can try, but in terms of free ones, this is my favorite.
• FX Camera: Free app that you should replace the default camera application of the Milestone with. Gives you lots of cool effects for post processing of pictures, but it’s the “Toy Camera” effect that is probably my favorite. The Milestone has a 5 megapixel camera on it. Use this app to put it to good use.
• FourSquare: If you’re on FourSquare, you need this app for your Android phone. Fluid, pretty, and a great UI.
• UStream: This application is just impressive. The 3G+ network was able to stream live video over the air without too much issue. I attempted this while riding a downtown bus and the Canada Line during my work commutes.

As I said, there are a lot of other neat applications in the Market Place. These were just a few highlights of the ones I liked and used the most.

And the not so much likes

I would have to say that the number one issue for me with this phone was its reliability from an OS standpoint. Simply put, Android is still growing with every upgrade Google releases.

That being said, my main issue came during the first few weeks of using the Milestone and how it would randomly reboot while taking a photo or trying to record video. Later on in the trial, this problem seemed to subside, perhaps due to application upgrades that were installed along the trial.

Probably another negative aspect of this phone was the battery life. One full charge would maybe get me to the end of the day. Heavy use is going to drain it faster, but even no use would bring the battery down to 25% or less. I would chalk this up to services running the background to keep your GMail synced, and more applications that operate similarly (Sesmic, FourSquare, etc.) will drain it even more.

As I already mentioned, the default camera app is disappointing. Many of the photos I took with it were blurry or simply just poor quality. For a 5 megapixel camera, I expected better out of the box.

Example of photo with Motorola Milestone default camera application

Maybe a saving grace of the camera on the Milestone is the flash, but it still misses the mark in terms of quality. In low to no light or even full light, the flash makes the shots worse. I was never able to take a photo where the flash made any shot turn out better than without it.

Example of low light photo with default camera application on the Motorola Milestone

Another aspect of the Milestone that I didn’t really care for was the weight of it. While the touchscreen is awesome in terms of function, you really need to hold the phone with both hands to use it efficiently and comfortably.

Even further, the slide out keyboard is basically a waste of space for this device, at least for me. I tried to use the keyboard as a comparison to my BlackBerry, but it never felt comfortable in terms of use or feel. I much rather be completely touchscreen based with the on screen QWERTY touchscreen keyboard. Motorola could have saved on production cost leaving out this feature on the Milestone.

Once again, I end with the Market Place as another aspect of this Android phone that, while makes it pretty cool, can leave you with a sour taste with the Milestone. With Android being as open source as it is, the massive amount of apps you can get also means you can get some that are poorly written, under-developed, out of date, etc. This is the case for all aspects of hardware and the software that runs on it, but it’s certainly worth noting the same issues of the iPhone and BlackBerry world are in the Android realm as well.

Final thoughts…

Bottom line, I really like the Motorola Milestone. It’s not the end all be all of smartphones, but coming from a BlackBerry perspective, I loved the functionality that I can only dream of having.

Touch screen, multi-touch, great looking display, easy to use, the 5MP camera, syncing to Google apps, and so on. Yes, there are flaws, but I also like the fact that there is an open source community working on making the Android OS better everyday. It’s not an iPhone killer but certainly an alternative.

Would I recommend the Motorola Milestone to everyone? It would really depend on the type of smartphone user you are and how much patience you have with a product that is barely a half year old in the real world. In time, I see this phone getting better with each hardware upgrade Motorola does and each OS upgrade that is released for Android.

Disclaimer

I was not paid to conduct or write this review. However, I have received the option of keeping the phone while discontinuing the Telus Mobility 3G+ voice and data service.

I’ve finally gotten around to getting our Brother MFC-9440CN printer setup. As you may or may not know, we’ve been given the opportunity to test drive this sucker out. And let me tell you, this puppy is a honking piece of machinery. By that, I mean that it’s large and heavy. We don’t have much room to spare in the apartment, so it’s on the floor in the corner of the dinning room/area. It’s secure and slightly raised off the floor, but generally in a good space.

Setting up the printer to work with our iMac was a bit tricky, but that was only because I thought the printer was supposed to have wireless capabilities. The single ethernet port on the back should have been a clue, but I swear someone told me it had wireless. No big deal as I had a spare cable to run from our router to the printer. Once I downloaded the driver for it, we were in business.

My first impression is that it takes a little long to start the actual print out. The data gets zipped straight over, but the time it takes to actually start printing is a bit lagging by about five to ten seconds. Perhaps adding more memory to it would help, but with its size and weight, you think it’d be a tad faster.

Also, the printer tends to make the paper curl just slightly after it’s done with the final product. That could be a symptom of the type of paper, but it’s interesting to note nonetheless. It’s nothing that can be dealt with, but just addressing things that I’ve noticed at first pass.

Printing out something with color in it has been impressive. The resolution is fairly good, and I’m sure I could set the printer to be even better. I just haven’t got that far. On top of that, I tested out the copying capabilities with the same printout. That’s considerably quick with matching quality. Having a printer is one thing, but the fact that you basically have a copy machine is pretty cool. That alone makes me pretty impressed with this unit.

The one thing about having this printer is we weren’t looking to buy one, and that was mainly because we didn’t have a need or a purpose to really use one. We already have a desk jet and scanner, separately, in the house, but it’s a painful process to get it all to work together in a roundabout, ten step process. Now that we have this Brother, all-in-one center, there might be more uses that we can find for it. I know that we were looking to do some photocopying some time back, and it does get a little annoying when you have to go to the post office to get it done. The quality this machine has is very comparable that you would get a five cents per copy at a store.

This is just the first foray into this printer, but at first attempt, I’m pretty impressed. Now we just need a better place we could put this thing. Would love it if someone gave us a nice set of workspace furniture to “try out” that could make the space in our apartment more efficient, wink wink nudge nudge.

Wow, is that ever the geekiest title I have ever put into a post. To give you a bit of back story, let me have this illustration that Darren Barefoot sent to Rebecca and I explain it further.

Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

I’m not exactly sure how long we get to test drive this thing, but the honking Brother MFC-9440CN showed up while we were in the states. After UPS called us, we got it delivered to Rebecca’s office. At that point, I had to meet her on my way home to get a taxi van to help us get it home.

Wanna see how big it is? Let me have this illustration explain it further. (I took the pictures. hehe)

Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

I’ll do my best to document the experiments that we’ll put to the test on this bohemith, and it will use some creativity to figure out how to do that. My guess is that when it’s time to give this thing back, I’ll understand that saying of not knowing what you got until what you’ve got is gone.

Interestingly enough, I was just scanning through the MacNN headlines when I caught, “Brother unveils color multifunction lasers“. Is that…? Yeah, it is! So not only has Brother unveiled these new printers, but we has gots one.