Motorola Milestone 2

 Visually, the Motorola Milestone 2 hasn't changed much from its original incarnation. It's exactly the same size and shape as the original Milestone, measuring 60x116x14mm and weighing 169g.

This sleek black-and-chrome smartphone has retained its 3.7in touchscreen display, which supports multitouch, as well as the slide-out qwerty keyboard. However, while the device might initially look the same, Motorola has made some changes for the better.

KEY POINTS

To begin with, the four-way controller on the keyboard has been ditched in favour of four cursor keys, making the other keys larger. They've been raised too.

We found the touchscreen was very responsive and needed only the lightest of touches. The keyboard keys are on the hard side, but they'll be a welcome addition for those who struggle with the size of on-screen keypads.

The Milestone 2 now features a 1GHz processor, providing a fair jump in speed compared to the
original 550MHz chip. This makes the device faster at processing commands and loading software.

This Motorola runs Android 2.2 (Froyo). Among the new features supported are Adobe Flash Player and voice-to-text controls. To compose emails or text messages this way you just press the microphone icon and start speaking your message. The phone will translate your voice into text, so you don't have to worry about the accuracy of your typing.

The theoretical benefit of this facility is clear, but in practice we found voice-to-text fairly slow at translating what we said. The results weren't always a success, although that might be down to this reviewer's south London accent. While we like the feature in principle, we do think it's more suited to occasional short text messages than long emails.

The Wi-Fi implementation has been updated to ensure the handset now supports the latest standards. Motorola also gives users the ability to turn their handset into a 3G hotspot: when Wi-Fi connectivity is turned on, up to five devices can connect to the phone and access he web through its 3G connection, network permitting.

Like its predecessor, the Milestone 2 supports microSD cards up to 32GB, but with a larger internal memory (8GB) users can get a total of 40GB. This means there's plenty of room to store pictures snapped on the phone's 5Mp camera, which comes with a dual LED flash and autofocus.

LITTLE SNAPPER

The images we captured were clear and sharp. You'll also find image stabilisation, real-time colour effects, geo-tagging, and basic in-phone editing functions such as crop and rotate. The Connected Media Player displays song lyrics and artist information for a track that's being played. There's no FM radio, but via 3G or Wi-Fi you can listen to internet radio stations

Another neat feature that's unique to Motorola phones is Motoblur. This service, also seen on the Defy, lets you get updates from your various social networking accounts and online photc services - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on - plus your Outlook email and webmail, and synchronise the lot.
VERDICT

This new model has some welcome improvements. Faster and with even more useful functions for both business and social networking, the Milestone 2 is a great Android phone. It's also built like a tank, which makes it ideal for those users who like a phone to feel indestructible.


Details

Price (SIM-free) £429 inc VAT 
Further information www.motorola.com/milestone2

Specifications Google Android 2.2 (Froyo); 3.7in, 480x854-pixel TFT screen; 1GHz processor; 5Mp camera; Slip-out qwerty keyboard; 8GB memory; 3G, WCDMA, GSM, Wi-Fi; 169g; 60x116x14mm