Time to put my creative skills to the test:
Just a short overview of my week of experience with the shiny phone.
Dramatic reenactment of the unboxing event.
Starting with the specs, the Milestone seems average, when compared to the recent application-phones, it’s CPU is a bit lower clocked than the iPhone or Palm Pre, 550 mhz to be exact vs. 600mhz from the familiar ARM Cortex-A8 that we find in the previously mentioned phones. Even if it’s abit lower clocked it still is very snappy, i have tried both the HTC TouchHD and TouchPro2, both of which i considered before deciding for the Milestone, which felt a lot slower than the Milestone.
Unfortunately i have little experience with the all mighty iPhone. But what i can say is that they both seem on par when it comes to speed and responsiveness.
The thing that really WOWed me, was the screen. 3.7″ which seems humongous for me, since my previous phone had a tiny 2″ display (yes size matters). The capacitive touch screen is also a nice feature, when compared with my previous experience of a resistive touch screen with the TouchPro2&TouchHD. It’s feels much more sensitive plus it’s just pure shininess using multi-touch to zoom in the web-pages/Google maps/pictures/shiny stuff…
Dramatic unboxing reenactment Vol. 2
So… what else. Oh, the phone came with some shiny 3.5mm headphones, the quality ain’t bad and the microphone on it is just pure tiny, you can hardly notice it, i have had no complaints with people i’ve talked to using the headset. Also it came with a pre-installed 8gb microSD card, class 4. So when adding/getting stuff from the phone you don’t have to wait (unlike the previous 4gb class 2 microSD card i had in my E51). Also, unlike the American Droid it came with MotoNav pre-installed for your GPS needs.
The call quality is also not bad, it also seems better than my previous E51, even when it’s lying on the table, using the hands-free mode.
The battery lasts for a good two days, with about 2 hours of calls per day / few emails&sms / random surfing & playing games in the evening / ~3 hours of music playback per day. But since it uses a normal micro-USB slot to recharge + a travel charger for when i don’t have a computer near me (which is _very_ rare).
Note that the screen is almost as big as my dear dumbphone: Nokia 2100
Android 2.0 is just fine, i had no trouble setting up my phone it’s very intuitive, fast and easy to use for us caged techies. Nice and clean interface makes it a very nice experience, only thing i added was the Retro-clock widget to my home screen. I wish HTC would give out their sense-UI, but since it’s heavily integrated to the android code, i guess we just have to wait for Cyanogen mod for Android 2.0 or some else software mod to use those _shiny_ interfaces.
All i can say, is that it’s a worthy investment, i wouldn’t suggest the iPhone, since the screen is smaller and the resolution is just plain microscopic when compared with the Milestone (Milestone: 480*854 vs. 480*320 on the iPhone vs. 320*240 on my old E51), they’re the same size, yet the Milestone has a dedicated keyboard + a nice on screen keyboard, yes apples is better, but c’mon… it’s an Apple product, you can’t change the battery, can’t upgrade the memory and apple finds jail-breaking bad… no matter what you do you will void the warranty, even when unlocking to use another network. The Milestone comes unlocked from O2 for just 481 euros (no contract). I could also suggest the HTC TouchPro2 if you want a hardware keyboard, but the older hardware in the TP2 is the reason why i decided for the Milestone.
The only thing i would like to see in the milestone is native network tethering, which we find in windows phone, but hey that’s why we root android devices.
All in all, it’s a very _shiny_ application-phone / smart-phone / definitely more than i hoped for (thank [insert religion here] for granting me with low expectations)
Big thanks go out to Camel cigarettes, cheap OJ (thanks cute cashier at penny), Typical Monday evening boredom, Spotify for the musical motivation and O2 for their speedy delivery (ordered it a bit more than a week ago on Thursday and got it on Friday evening).
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