Motorola Milestone XT720 review

Motorola has had a period in the doldrums, but has resurfaced recently with its Android toting Milestone and Dext handsets. Now there’s another new entrant, the Milestone XT720. Is this another upward step for Motorola in its return to top form?

The Milestone XT720 certainly has the specifications side of things nailed down nicely. Android 2.1, 8-megapixel camera with Xenon flash and 720p video recording, 3.7-inch 480x854 pixel capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS.

And it even sports the latest must-have to complement its 720p video recording – a miniature HDMI port and the cable for sending your photos, video and other content to a larger screen. Sounds like the important bases are all covered, then.

But this isn’t what grabs the attention when the Milestone XT720 first comes out of its box. No, that is the overall size and weight of this smartphone. And its odd shape. Overall the Milestone XT720 measures 116x61x11mm and it weighs 160g. It has a very odd curve on the bottom right of the shell whose reason for existence we can’t fathom.

OK, the curve houses three lights that illuminate when you are in gallery, stills camera or video camera modes. But seriously, Moto, we could have lived without the lights if they are the only reason for the curve.

Some will say this protuberance makes the Milestone XT720 easier to hold, some will say it adds a flash of difference to the usual rectangular design of smartphones. For our money it is just a bit of a pain, though one that doesn’t affect usability one way or the other. So, moving on.

Motorola has decided not to skin Android 2.1 this time around, and social media fans will perhaps be disappointed to learn that the Motoblur is not here either. For our money that omission is odd. We’d like to see Moto put Motoblur on all its handsets, and let you, the user, decide whether to turn it on or off.

Still, you can download Twitter and Facebook apps from the Android market, and you get five home screens which you can cram with Android widgets.

You are going to want to know if that 8-megapixel camera and the 720p video recording are worth their salt though, aren’t you? Well, the Xenon flash is a first for an Android smartphone, and it does a better job of helping out in low light conditions than an ordinary flash does, though you still need to be quite close to the subject to get a good shot.

There is a good macro mode, and the face detection and panorama modes are both nice extras. But the camera doesn’t really deliver what the specs suggest it might. Images in general were a bit over exposed and the 720p videos we shot (at 24 frames a second, incidentally) were all rather jerky.

The big screen lends itself well to video viewing, though, and watching movies from third parties such as streamed YouTube content was a satisfactory experience. You’ll need to use Wi-Fi to get the best from YouTube, and to keep your data charges down, of course, but that’s not unusual and it is no problem.

Web browsing too, over Wi-Fi or the network, is a fine experience. The large screen means you can see plenty, and its capacitive nature means pinch to zoom is here. We know this isn’t the be all and end all of smartphones, but when it is not present we rue its absence. Still, there is no Flash support so don’t for a moment think of watching a lot of embedded video.

If you do want to go to town with video shooting there is good news in that Moto provides an 8GB microSD card for data storage.

The screen is a tad reflective which means that framing photos, and indeed doing anything else, outside in bright sunlight can be a bit of a challenge. Oh, and while we are dissing the screen, it seems more than usually keen to capture and retain grease from fingers. You’ll be cleaning this one a lot.

The GPS sits alongside Google Maps, naturally enough, and Motorola has also bundled its own navigation solution, called Motonav. Try it for free for a while, but when it comes to time to pay up, we’d probably stick with Google Maps.

The big downer of the Milestone XT720 has to be its battery life. You can’t expect superb battery life from a mobile phone that has a screen the size of this one and all the multimedia features that are on tow here. But we struggled to get a day from it without a recharge, which might be a blow to some people.

In the end the Milestone XT720 is undoubtedly a top notch smartphone, but Motorola may have over-egged its own custard. The 8-megapixel camera might have been better replaced by a top notch 5-megapixel one, the 720p video recording is disappointingly jerky, and the battery life simply won’t cut it for some users.