Motorola Milestone

Review Motorola's recent stock of smartphones has been an impressive return to form after a few years of style phone stasis.

The Milestone runs on the latest, 2.0 version of Android, delivering an easy-to-use icon-based UI which allows you to scatter widgets across three different home pages. It's quite a hefty handful though its relative slimness means it's not too much of a drag on the pocket.

The broad dimensions means there's room for a bigger than average keyboard, with 40 keys over four lines, plus a large five-way navpad which luxuriates in its own wide space at the side. Whether you consider this space well used or would have preferred more keys is a moot point.

The keys are fairly big but they sit flat, and would have benefited from being ridged or raised in the middle – they're okay, but they could have been better, especially when you try to get up a bit of speed.

The expansive 3.7in capacitive screen is a bit of a gem, however: clear and bright, plus it supports multi-touch pinch and zoom, which always gets our vote for web browsing ease.

You may have heard about the marvellous Motoblur feature on Motorola's Dext phone which pulls together all your social networking updates and displays them on your homepage, but don't look for it here. Motorola has inexplicably chosen not to include it. There is, however, a decent 5Mp camera and Assisted GPS supported by Google Maps. ®

Next: Nokia E72