Design

Motorola has a good reputation for making solid hardware and the Milestone is no exception. Held in the hands, it feels sturdily constructed and doesn’t exhibit creakiness when squeezed or flexed. This smartphone is quite heavy at 165g, and with a footprint of 115.8 x 60mm, it may not fit into everyone’s pockets or handbags. The good news is Motorola has kept the Milestone quite slim at 13.7mm, even though it comes with a slide-out keypad.

The 3.7-inch WVGA (854 x 480-pixel) display takes up most of the front face of this smartphone. The screen looks bright and sharp, giving us no problems when viewing it indoors or out in the sun. Below the LCD are four touch-sensitive buttons–Back, Menu, Home and Search. Even though Motorola has tried to give the user tactile feedback by having the phone vibrate slightly when these shortcuts are used, we would have preferred if they were physical keys instead. This is because on numerous occasions during our evaluation period, accidental activation of Back or Home occurred, especially when holding the device in landscape orientation to take a photo.

A single micro-USB port is found on the left side of the Milestone, while a 3.5mm audio jack is located at the top beside the power button. Volume control and a camera shutter are on the right spine. The Milestone also comes with a microSDHC slot and has an 8GB card bundled. Unfortunately, the battery needs to be removed if you wish to swap cards.

Sliding the screen to the right will reveal a physical QWERTY keypad meant to be used with the phone oriented in landscape mode. The layout of the keypad is sensible with all the letters and punctuation keys found where you’d expect them to be. A large directional pad is on the right of this keyboard for navigating between fields or moving the onscreen cursor. Sad to say, we did not like this keypad. Though each key is large enough even for fleshy thumbs, they are placed without physical separation from one another, making it easy to hit the wrong key at times. They are also flush with the inside surface, adding to our difficulty in “feeling” the keys. What’s more, the sliding mechanism is unassisted, which means there’s no spring to complete the movement so you have to push all the way to expose the QWERTY keypad. We found ourselves using the onscreen soft keyboard exclusively instead of the physical one after a while.

Features

The important thing about the Milestone that contrasts it with the Droid is that the former works in Asia. This is thanks to its quad-band GSM and HSPA support. Its maximum download and upload speeds are 10.2- and 5.7Mbps respectively. Of course, your actual transfer rates will vary depending on the operator’s network. Other connectivity features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS for satellite navigation.

In some countries, Motorola has sold the Milestone for a while now with Android 2.0 installed. The latest market to launch this product is Singapore and the phone now comes with Android 2.1 preinstalled. Users in places like Hong Kong and Thailand will be able to upgrade to 2.1, too, over the air.

Because this is an Android experience handset, you won’t get the company’s custom MotoBlur software like what’s found on the Dext. That’s not necessarily a negative point as MotoBlur is the factor that’s keeping the Dext at Android 1.5 as the company has not completely ported this custom interface over to Eclair yet.

So, like the Nexus One sold by Google, you get all the basic features of Android 2.1. This includes integration with Google services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. Maps and YouTube applications are installed by default and work without a hitch as long as you have a valid data connection.

What’s worth mentioning are the extras added by Motorola. Because turn-by-turn navigation from Google in the Maps application is not available outside of the US, a MotoNav program is preinstalled to fill that gap. We tried this out and found it to work as promised, getting us from point A to B with clear voice instructions. The interface wasn’t great and felt slow at times, but once you get past the initial stage of keying in destinations and landmarks, the UI is irrelevant when driving. The bad news is that it will work for only 60 days, after which you’ll have to purchase a license which costs 44.99 euros (US$60.50).

Another feature is the Moto Phone Portal. When connected to a PC and launched, this app will allow you to access your phone data such as contacts, text messages and photos from your computer’s Internet browser. This is convenient for making backups or just to transfer images without having to install any program in your PC.

Accessories available for the Milestone include a desktop dock and car dock. These are optional and we are waiting for information on their individual unit prices.

The camera found on the Milestone is a 5-megapixel one with an LED for dark situations. It worked fine for casual snapshots, but don’t expect too much from it. This was especially obvious for indoor shots as we noticed quite a bit of image noise even when the LED was activated to light up our subjects.

Performance

With a 550MHz processor and 256MB RAM, the Milestone was quite snappy during our test period. It may pale in comparison to the Nexus One‘s 1GHz chip and 512MB RAM, but we did not feel a huge difference in performance during basic operations.

Call quality on the Milestone was excellent, thanks to its Motorola’s Crystal Talk technology which cancels background noise so the other party can hear you better.

Battery life wasn’t that good. With Google services such as Gmail set to sync automatically, a full charge of its battery depleted before a 24-hour period transpired. When our Google account’s auto-sync was turned off, we got about 1.5 days of use with occasional phone calls, about half an hour of music and frequent access to social-networking services through dedicated Twitter and Facebook apps.

Note : Android-2.1 goes to-Motorola Milestone Over-The-Air

Conclusion

With a retail price of S$888 and even less with a mobile contract tied in, the Milestone presents good value for money. Basic Android features aside, we were particularly impressed by its voice quality and general responsiveness, while its main fault lay in battery life and a less-than-stellar keyboard. Nonetheless, the Milestone is still a nifty smartphone that we won’t hesitate to recommend if you’re in the market for an Android device.

Still, we couldn’t help but feel shortchanged by Google in some aspects just for being in Asia. You cannot as yet get paid apps from the Android Market, the Buzz layer in Google Maps is disabled, and voice-to-text has to be stripped out even though Google allows it on the Nexus One which also ships to Singapore and Hong Kong.

The Motorola Milestone was just launched in Singapore and is also available in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand in Asia. Motorola was not able to be more specific about the handset’s availability in other markets in this region, so check with your local operator if we haven’t listed your country.

By John Chan

Design

Some have described the Motorola Quench as the Dext without the physical keyboard, but it’s not quite that simple. In fact, we’d say there are more differences than similarities between the two models in terms of design. For one, the Quench is taller, wider, thinner, and lighter than the Dext at 116.7 x 59.4 x 12.3mm and 123.5g. Without the slide-out keyboard, the Quench’s slimmer profile makes it easier to slide the smartphone into a pants pocket and is lightweight while still feeling solid.

Without a slide-out keyboard, the Motorola Quench is a much more pocket-friendly device.

In addition, the back of the phone has a textured pattern that feels a bit like the leatherette backplate on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 to give it that extra bit of durability. However, if that doesn’t suit you, T-Mobile and Moto throw in an extra back cover in the box that has a smoother, soft-touch finish and comes in a metallic purple color.

The Quench comes with an extra back cover in the box.

The Quench shares the same 3.1-inch HVGA (320 x 480 pixels) capacitive touchscreen as the Dext and Motorola Backflip. It’s sufficiently bright and clear, but doesn’t have the sharpness and vibrancy as some of the higher-end devices, such as the Motorola Milestone and Nexus One. We understand the Quench isn’t in the same class as those devices and there will be trade-offs, but that said, we wish the screen was bigger. At 3.1 inches diagonally, content on the screen appears squished and condensed and text can look tiny.

The onscreen keyboard is also pretty cramped, so composing even the quickest text message required extra time and more concentration. Fortunately, there is an alternative to the standard Android keyboard and that’s Swype. We first saw Swype on the Samsung Omnia II and the software basically allows you to spell out words by dragging your finger from letter to letter on the keyboard. If you’re skeptical, we totally understand; we were, too. However, Swype works surprisingly well and is quite accurate. It gets a little tricky when you’re spelling out longer words, and we wish there was a dedicated .com button when entering URLs or email addresses; otherwise, we much favored Swype over the standard Android keyboard and switched it to our default keyboard.

The smartphone’s smaller display made the onscreen keyboard feel a bit cramped, but using the Swype software definitely helped the situation.

On the upside of things, the Quench offers multitouch capabilities, so you can use the pinch-to-zoom gesture in the browser and picture gallery. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in Google Maps, so you’ll have to use the onscreen magnifying glass icon if you want to get a closer look at anything. The display also has a built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor, and a small LED above the screen glows intermittently to alert you to notifications for missed calls, calendar appointments, updates, news messages, and so forth.

Below the screen, you get the usual home, menu, search, and back buttons found on most Android smartphones but the Quench also offers a navigational touch pad. With it, you can scroll through lists and menus and switch home screen panels and press on it to select an item. It works perfectly fine, but we often just ended up using the touch screen. One helpful tip: If you hold down the Home key, it will bring up a small window of all your running apps so you can easily switch between them.

On the left side, there’s a volume rocker and a micro-USB port; the right side holds the power/lock button and the camera activation/capture key. A 3.5mm headphone jack is located on top, and the camera and flash are on the back with the microSD expansion slot

The Motorola Quench comes packaged with an AC adapter, a USB cable, an extra back plate in a metallic purple, a wired stereo headset, a 2GB microSD card, and reference material.

Features

The Motorola Quench’s feature set is largely similar to the Dext’s, as both smartphones run Motoblur software and Android 1.5. We’re not going to dive into every detail of Motoblur and the OS here but instead will focus on some of the new functions specific to the Quench. Before we move on, however, we know many of you are wondering when these smartphones will be upgradeable to Android 2.1. Motorola has posted a general release schedule on its support site, and the upgrade for the Dext (as well as the Quench we’re told) is planned for Q2. Unfortunately, we don’t have a more specific date for you, but we can only hope the over-the-air updates will be pushed out on the earlier side, starting in April.

One cool thing you get on the Quench right out of the gate is a revamped music player that integrates a handful of connected services. From within the player, you can now stream music from ShoutCast radio, identify songs with SoundHond, and search and view music videos on YouTube or GoTV. Also integrated into the player is TuneWiki Community, which has several components, such as Music Maps where you can see what other people are listening to around your current location or other major cities. What we like best about the player is that it provides numerous ways to discover new music as well as the capability to purchase tracks and share recommendations in one seamless experience.

Connectivity, in general, is a strong point of the Quench. Motoblur takes care of merging your contacts, email, and calendar entries from various accounts and social-networking sites into a master list, and streams any new happening or updates via home-screen widgets. The smartphone also offers quad-band world roaming, 3G support, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0. The Quench’s Android HTML WebKit browser allows you to open multiple windows and has support for Flash Lite 8.1, so you should be able to view Flash content, such as YouTube videos, right from the browser.

Of course, you still get the dedicated YouTube app as well as other standard Android apps and offerings, including Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google voice search, and the Quickoffice Suite. There were some extra apps loaded on our device, such as TeleNav GPS Navigator, Slacker Radio, and Shazam, but there are plenty more titles in the Android Market available for download. As always, though, be aware that you can only save apps to the phone’s main memory and not to an SD card.

The Quench has a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash, digital zoom, and autofocus. It can also record MPEG video at 24 frames per second at HVGA resolution. There are standard editing options, such as color effects, white balance, and picture quality. The smartphone is GPS-enabled so you can geotag photos as well as add custom tags if you please.

We were quite impressed with the picture quality. The image shot above was taken in a rather dimly lit room, but the Quench’s camera managed to grab a very sharp and vibrant shot, even without the flash. There is a little bit of shutter lag, so don’t pull your hand away too quickly after pressing the capture button.

Performance

We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) Motorola Quench in New York using T-Mobile service and call quality was great. There was barely any background noise or voice distortion on our end, allowing us to talk carefree with friends. The sound was rich and there was plenty of volume, so we had no problems using an airline’s voice automated response system. Callers also praised the device and commented, in particular, about the lack of any background noise. We did get a slight bit of hissing when we activated the speakerphone, but only during breaks in the conversation. The speaker has plenty of volume, too, so we had no problems using the speakerphone in noisier environments. Pairing the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones went off without a hitch as well.

T-Mobile’s 3G network was mostly reliable throughout Manhattan, though it did drop to EDGE several times in the Midtown area. On average, a full website loaded in 22 seconds; CNN and ESPN’s mobile sites loaded in 7 seconds and 6 seconds, respectively. With the built-in Flash Lite support, we were able to play YouTube videos right from the browser as well as video from other sites like Angry Alien. It took a couple of seconds to buffer, but clips played back smoothly with synchronized picture and audio. MP4 files also played back nicely, but again, we wish the display were bigger since it was a bit of a strain on the eyes. Music playback sounded rich and well-balanced whether we were listening to tracks through the phone’s speakers or through our Bose On-Ear Headphones.

The Quench is equipped with the same 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor as the Backflip, but thankfully didn’t exhibit the same sluggishness and bugginess as AT&T’s first Android phone. The Quench wasn’t a high-performance machine that blew us away with amazing speeds. There were some brief delays when switching screen orientations or launching an app, but thedevice was much quicker to respond than the Backflip, and it handled multiple apps at once. We didn’t experience any crashes or spontaneous reboots, so all in all, the Quench felt like a stable machine.

The Motorola Quench has a 1,420mAh lithium-ion battery with a rated talk time of 6.5 hours and up to 13.5 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests but will update this section as soon as we have final results. According to FCC radiation tests, the Quench has a digital SAR rating of 1.36 watts per kilogram.

By Bonnie Cha

Motorola hopes an upcoming raft of Android handsets will breathe new life into the cooling corpse of its mobile phone efforts. The company has made a promising start with the Dext. 

The Dext smartphone is no beauty, but it does what it says on the tin, providing a solid Android experience, with some handy social-networking extras, packed up with a full QWERTY keyboard. It has some flaws, like widgets that can’t quite get their act together and terrible call quality, but a snappy touchscreen and powerful operating system more than make up for its deficiencies.

It’s all a Motoblur

The Dext is a slider phone with a QWERTY keyboard tucked underneath a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. It’s the first QWERTY-keyboard-toting Android phone to emerge since the Dream, made by HTC, and it aims to tempt the social-networking massive. To that end, Motorola’s tweaked version of Android, Motoblur, provides some extra features to help bring your contacts together.

The widgets on the home screen help you stay up-to-date with social-network shenanigans

For example, sign into your Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and MySpace accounts, and the Dext will grab all your contacts, including their profile photos, and merge them with your Google account to fill up the phone’s address book. We found that it did a great job of linking contacts across accounts, and it was ace to be able to sort our contacts by name or recent updates. We missed, however, a few of the simpler tweaks that make an address book easy to use. For example, when we had a contact with a company name and no personal name, the Dext listed it by phone number. That could be a real pain for business users. 

Once you’ve given the Dext all of your account information, you can update your status in Facebook and tweet at the same time, as well as send messages to your contacts in any one of umpteen ways. Motorola has also created some widgets that display your social whirl on the home screen: You can see your status, your messages–including direct tweets, Facebook messages, emails and texts–and ‘happenings’ (a stream of all your contacts’ recent posts). 

It’s all a big bundle of fun, if you’re into that kind of thing, and it’s helpful if you don’t like to have to check your various networks separately. The widgets are fine but we’d have liked more room for the text, and we found the happenings sometimes strayed out of the correct chronological order. 

As well as the social-networking gubbins, Motoblur also includes an online service. It’s similar to Apple’s MobileMe and Nokia’s Ovi, not to mention a host of other offerings, providing a Web-based service that backs up your accounts and messages over the air. You can also track your phone by its GPS signal, and, if it’s not somewhere you think you can find it, like your house or your local boozer, you can wipe it remotely too. 

Android adventure

Other than the messaging and address-book tweaks, Motorola has left most of the Android user interface alone. That means there’s no multi-touch support, so you can’t zoom into photos or Web pages with a pinch of your fingers. We really missed this great feature, since it’s so intuitive and accurate, especially for zooming in on Web pages full of tiny links. If you’ve never used multi-touch before, you may not miss it, though. 

The Dext has access to the wonderful Android Market, which makes zillions of apps easy to find and install. That means the Dext has huge potential for growth, whether you’re exploiting the infinite jukebox of Spotify or turning it into a Skype phone. Many of the apps are free, and, although they don’t tend to be quite as slick as the apps available for the iPhone, the Android Market wins points for giving its developers more scope for creativity. 

As well as its Android goodness, the Dext has solid specs, with a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and HSDPA for fast downloads over 3G. It comes with a 2GB memory card (it supports cards of up to 32GB) and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so you can listen to your tunes on your own cans. 

Real or virtual keyboard?

The Dext’s physical keyboard is a mixed bag. The keys are large and raised, but there’s no space between them. Still, it’s impressive that Motorola has packed them into a small space without sacrificing too much usability, and we had no trouble typing our emails and texts accurately. There’s also a fairly good onscreen keyboard. It’s very responsive, although it doesn’t offer the useful shortcuts to numbers and symbols that the HTC Hero does.

The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is easy to type on accurately, and there’s a responsive on-screen keyboard as well

In general, we preferred to type on the physical keyboard, even though it can be a pain, because you’re forced to flip from portrait orientation to landscape when you pop it open. In some cases, that meant we stuck to the on-screen keyboard when typing a quick missive on a screen that looked better in portrait orientation, such as a Web page. 

Ugly duckling

With the power of Android, a peppy touchscreen and some fun social-networking features, there’s only one big drawback that kept us from loving the Dext like a long-lost friend: Its frumpy appearance. It’s a surprise that Motorola, which is known for producing sexy phones like the Razr, took a major design cue for the Dext from the lumpen Nokia N97. It’s rather chunky, with a dull chrome trim over boring black plastic, and the white labels for the buttons on the side look like temporary stickers that should peel off but don’t. 

It also feels rather flimsy, and the slider wobbled slightly on our sample. This poor build quality had a brutal knock-on effect on the call quality of our test phone, with a loose speaker leading to a terrible buzzing noise during our calls. We think other Dext handsets might not suffer the same problem, but be ready to test it right out of the box to ensure you haven’t got a dud. 

Although the Dext is the N97′s cousin in terms of looks, it’s definitely the smarter, more talented of the two. The Dext is actually everything we hoped the N97 would be, thanks to its zippy, attractive, capacitive touchscreen and a user interface that’s a pleasure to use. 

Conclusion

If you’re drowning in a social-networking deluge of updates and messages, the Motorola Dext may be the answer for keeping everything under control. Throw in a full QWERTY keyboard, you’ve got an excellent phone that’s built for staying in touch, as long as you don’t actually want to make calls. 

A good-looking, responsive touchscreen and the powerful, expandable Android operating system help to make up for the Dext’s uninspiring looks and slightly questionable build quality, making for a well-rounded smartphone that we’d be happy to be caught typing on.

[Flora Graham]