Learn All About the Motorola Milestone XT720 - Successor to the Droid
After being written off a few months ago, Motorola has made quite a comeback with its Android smartphone lineup. The Motorola Droid was a runaway hit, it is undoubtedly one of the most popular Android phones yet. The Motorola Droid X, which we previewed earlier, is one of the best Android phones due to hit the market soon. The third major release by Motorola is the Motorola Milestone XT720 which is going to be released soon, in a week or so.
The Motorola Milestone XT720 is a direct upgrade to the Motorola Droid; it offers much better hardware and sports an 8 MP camera compared to the Droid’s 5 MP camera. It comes loaded with Android 2.1 (Eclair) but will get an upgrade to Android 2.2 (Froyo).
It is quite compact and is both slimmer and lighter than the Motorola Droid, on account of losing the QWERTY keypad. It sports the same display as the Droid - a 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels (FWVGA) and support for 16 M colors. The display is quite good, but cannot match up to the AMOLED display of the Samsung Galaxy S.
Motorola Milestone XT720 Design and Features
The asymmetrical design is pretty stylish and the build quality is very good. You have 4 touch sensitive buttons below the huge display - Menu, Home, Back and Search. On the right you have the volume controls and the camera keys while on the left you have the microUSB port. The camera, flash and the battery compartment are housed on the back plate. On the top, there is the 3.5 mm audio jack, the HDMI out and power button. Near the bottom right of the display, you also find 3 icons which indicate what is active - the camera, video recording or the gallery.
It sports an 8 MP camera with autofocus and Xenon flash. It can capture images at a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. The image capture quality is very good, it can easily double up as a portable camera for casual usage. The camera interface is very intuitive and offers a lot of customization options. It can also record 720p video at 24 FPS. It also integrates features like geotagging, face detection and smile detection.
It runs on Android 2.1 (Eclair) but an update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) is in the pipeline. The Motoblur UI is being used on top of the OS. It has much better hardware than its predecessor - the Motorola Droid. It comes with a ARM Cortex 720 MHz processor and 512 MB RAM. It has 512 MB of flash storage and comes with support for up to 32 GB memory cards.
It also supports all the standard connectivity options - GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and a microUSB 2.0 port. It also has an FM Radio with RDS and a GPS transceiver with A-GPS support. It also has an HDMI slot to view content on a bigger display. The device is powered by a 1390 mAh battery. Overall it is a capable device and a viable alternative if you can’t get the Droid X.
