Motorola Milestone XT720 review

The Motorola Milestone XT720 has some of the most impressive-sounding specifications of any Android smartphone currently available.

It has an eight-megapixel camera with Xenon flash, a large, high resolution screen, the ability to shoot 720p video, and an HDMI port for showing video and photos on an external display. The phone supports HSDPA download speeds up 10.2Mbps and upload speeds up to 5.76Mbps, as well as the usual Wi-Fi and GPS. Android 2.1 is installed so business users have the benefit of Microsoft Exchange support for email, calendars and contacts.

The only gaps in its specifications department are the 550MHz processor – other top end smartphones have faster 1GHz processors – and the lack of 802.11n support for WiFi.

Neither of these omissions bothered us during use. A more important limitation is the quality of the eight-megapixel camera, which did not live up to our expectations.

The camera has a fair few settings on hand including a multi-shot mode, face detection, a macro mode and touch focus so you can touch the screen to make the camera to focus on what you want it to. There’s no significant shutter lag either.

Stills look reasonably good, but they didn't look significantly better than images taken on smartphones with five-megapixel cameras. The Xenon flash does a better job than the more common LED flash units of illuminating close-up subjects indoors. However, like all flashes, its efficacy diminishes the further away from the subject you are.

The 720p video shooting is peppered with pauses while data is processed. We found these pauses replicated in saved video, which makes viewing recorded clips an unpleasant and unsatisfactory experience.

Unlike the original Milestone, the XT720 doesn't have a slide-out physical keyboard. We weren't fond of the original Milestone's stiff, unresponsive keys, so we won't miss it. This does mean you'll have to rely on the onscreen touch keyboard, but thankfully it feels responsive and works well, especially when the screen is oriented horizontally as makes the keyboard bigger.

An alternative to the onscreen keyboard is Android's built-in speech recognition. We found it to be very good indeed at turning our spoken words into text for SMS or emails. There’s a microphone icon on the keyboard and you just tap this to start the speech recognition engine. This speech recognition feature does require an internet connection though, since it relies on Google's servers to process your dictation into text.

The handset itself is very well made. The backplate is made of reassuringly solid metal coloured in a rather attractive shade of blue. The metal helps account for the 160g of weight that makes the Motorola Milestone XT720 noticeably heavier than other smartphones, but it is actually slightly lighter than the original Milestone.

The shiny front picks up fingerprints easily. There are four touch sensitive buttons beneath the screen for Home, Menu, Back and Search functions. A very peculiar design quirk of the chassis is that the bottom right edge bulges outwards making the Motorola Milestone XT720 wider at this point than elsewhere. We don't have any strong feelings about this bulge either way, but it might be enough to stop those with smaller hands reaching all the way across the screen when working one-handed.

On the edge at this point are the camera shortcut button and a button which cycles you through the media gallery, stills shooting and video shooting modes. Tiny icons light up to remind you which shooting mode you are in, as if the live on-screen preview wasn't enough.