Motorola Blogged

The Motorola Milestone (aka Droid in the US) was a huge success for Android and Motorola. It is still one of the bestselling Android smartphones on the market, even though there are better and faster alternatives. But of course, time doesn’t stay still, and the successor to the Milestone is already here. The Milestone 2 is a direct evolution of its predecessor, and it features only minor changes in the hardware and the exterior.

The front part that contains the screen now has the “lip” integrated into it, instead of the back piece, as in the first Milestone. But the best exterior change is the keyboard, which has been refined and made better for typing. It is not flat anymore, but features bumps that make it easier to type, and with the dreaded gold navigation key gone, it’s one of the best keyboards on the market.

Internally, the Motorola Milestone 2 has been upgraded with a 1GHz TI OMAP SOC (which has a pretty good video chip that should be better than the one in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon solution), 512 MB of RAM (which is really needed, 256 just wasn’t enough anymore), 720p video capabilities on the 5 megapixels camera, Wifi N support and 8 GB of internal memory + a micro SD card slot that supports cards of up to 32 GB capacity (64 and maybe more in the future), so you can have a lot more storage space for your data.

All of this is great and makes the phone a worthy competitor, but despite running Android 2.2, Motorola has decided to lose some customers with their custom Motoblur skin for the OS, which a lot of people hate and is impossible to uninstall.
If you like or don’t care about that, the Milestone 2 is definitely a great phone, but if you want to have a more pure Android and smartphone experience, you’d be better off with a HTC Desire Z, which has the same specs, same great keyboard and comes with a default Android 2.2 installation that can be easily customized to your liking.

It seems that the Motorola Flipout is indeed Euro-bound, but the Android smart phone will initially be available in Germany. According to the latest reports, the new square Android handset from Motorola will be getting a July launch and it will be priced at about 350 Euros –pretty decent for a handset of this caliber.

The Flipout is most well known and recognizable for the unique form factor; it is almost perfectly square –if you do not count in the rounded, tapered edges. The screen is a 2.8 inch TFT capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels that sits in the center of the device. Also has an accelerometer that allows the screen to auto rotate when viewed in different orientations.

Hidden below the front screen is a physical QWERTY keyboard which literally flips downward (though it is a sliding-spinning motion as opposed to a clam shell style flip). The four row QWERTY keypad gives users convenience and ease when typing long messages and emails. Sadly, the buttons of the keyboard are packed in rather tightly, and some users might take a while getting used to typing on this phone. Thanks to the slightly raised buttons and the slight space adjustment between the “t” and “y” columns, typing with two thumbs seems a lot more efficient.

As expected, the device will be using Motorola’s very own Motoblur user interface which gives users access to live widgets. This feature allows you to customize the various contents that will be displayed onscreen. With only 150MB of internal memory, users will want to make use of a microSD card (the device can support up to 32GB cards). The 3.2 mega pixel camera takes great quality images and it also takes custom 352 x 288 videos at 30 FPS.

So far, Motorola has yet to confirm when the device will actually hit UK shelves, but many are predicting it to be within the same month as the German release.