To hell with Motorola.

Milestone 1 hasn't received Froyo in Canada yet. Even if you could lay that at the feet of our arrogant monopolistic carriers (quite possibly true,) who in the name of sweet fnord releases an Android phone without a 1Ghz processor? Android 3 compatible or GTFO.

Mine's the one with a proper HTC Desire in the pocket. (Which Telus could get the Froyo update out for ANY TIME NOW….)

smartphones

sure i like smartphones with all this fancy stuff on but there releasing them far to quick thease days its almost every week for christ sake lol

Milestone V1

I Also have a Milestone V1 running Android 2.1

When it arrived it had prominently displayed on the box "The Phone Without Compromise"

What a total load of bull.

No FM radio - can't even stream radio over the internet reliably as the BBC keep changing iPlayer to prevent 3rd party apps from working, and their own app only allows access to pre-recorded stuff (not live)

Camera is a Joke - If you are in nice brightly lit surroundings, then the pictures are pretty OK, but as soon as you try to use it in even the slightest low-light situation, like in a pub, or slightly dark office, then all you get are awful grainy noisy pictures that I'm embarrassed to show people. My old Nokia N82 took photos that absolutely blow this phone out of the water.

Time - The phone is incapable of having the correct (precise) time applied to it. By this I mean that you can change the time (Hours & Minutes) but cannot change the seconds. Most Digital clocks from 20 years ago get around this by resetting the seconds to zero when you change the minutes, but Motorola / Google decided that 2+ decades of wisdom regarding setting the time should go out the window. If the clock is currently say 10:20:23 and you set the time to 10:22 then the time will actually be set to 10:22:23 instead of 10:22:00

What this means is that apps which rely upon time synchronisation between the device fail miserably. Google Talk is the prime example - during a conversation any messages sent TO you will have a timestamp set by the GTalk server, but they are displayed on screen according to the phones internal clock. This means that you end up getting replies to messages you sent appearing in the thread before the message that it is in reply to - which is just bonkers.

To add insult to injury, the OS has been specifically built so that user apps are not permitted to change the time, so using NTP is out of the question unless you root the phone, which invalidates the warranty.

The ONLY way to sync time on the phone / OS is using NITZ (Network Identity and Time Zone) which guess what? Isn't used in the UK.

VPN - The device is advertised as supporting IPSec VPNs - Yeah - only if you use totally obscure devices as your VPN Concentrator / router. Connecting to an IPSec VPN using the massively ubiquitous IPSec VPN using group ID & Password (Like Cisco) fails as there is nowhere on the phone to enter these details.

To make matters even worse is that Google completely ignore user requests:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3902

The request to add proper IPSec capablilities to the OS has been in place for nearly a year, and it still hasn't been assigned to anyone - it is currently the second most requested feature after arabic language support, but has actually been up for much longer.

Fan Effing Tastic.

</rant> Sorry that turned into a general android bashing, but had to be done.

About time

I have never understood why something designed to go with you almost everywhere is so suceptible to a bit of water.

At some point or another, almost everyone who owns a mobile has got it wet, and had to suffer the suspense of will-it-work-or-won't-it after drying it for a couple of days on the radiator.

Well done to motorolla, hope it does well and other manufacturers take notice.

(I know there are a few other waterproof phones, but most are pretty basic phones. I think this is the first waterproof "smartphone", and I'm pretty sure its the first android one)

Pass

FYI-

Before buying this device you might want to know how the first Milestone has been doing.

A little while after release, the Milestone was upgraded from 2.01 to 2.1. this update caused all manner of problems with the device:

- the music player would randomly start playing over the loudspeaker when it was idle in your pocket.

- the phone would randomly reboot itself.

- if you turn the phone off, it would eventually decide to turn itself back on.

- etc

After much complaining, Motorola eventually accepted these were genuine bugs and made a new firmware to fix the problems. This firmware has still to be released to the UK. For months the phone has been in this state of brokenness, but they claim they're waiting for "network approval" for the updates. The Milestone is only sold sim-free in the UK and the networks that have been contacted say they don't have anything from Motorola to approve and wouldn't expect to since it's a sim-free only phone.

The Droid (the US version of the Milestone) already has Froyo (2.2).

Motorola recently announced that they were still undecided whether the Milestone was to get the 2.2 at all. They were basically considering making the phone defunct 8 months after release, leaving the device borderline unusable. Again, after much complaining, they agreed to do the 2.2 update, but not until "Q4", which roughly translates to "next year". Whether or not they will actually release this update in the UK, we'll see...

So if they treat the Milestone 2 the same way they treated the first one, i'd highly recommend you steer well clear.

I'm currently looking to replace the device, so if anyone can recommend a phone maker that has a track record of good support, i'd be very appreciative.