Motorola Milestone XT720 – Sluggish performance

Motorola Milestone XT720 is powered by Android 2.1 which is a dated version. You do get all the Android goodies like Gmail, Google Maps Navigation, Google Talk, QuickOffice, and dedicated YouTube app. The manufacturer said the Android 2.2 update will be provided soon but they didn’t reveal the date. Android 2.1 aka Froyo will give you features like voice dialing over Bluetooth, Flash 10.1 support, etc.

Motorola Milestone XT720, just like most Android phones, can sync with IMAP, POP3, Gmail and Exchange accounts. It also pulls contacts from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The handset gives you separate apps for corporate directory and corporate calendar. I tried setting up my Gmail, Facebook and Outlook Web Access accounts and the process was quite smooth. You need to enter the login ID and password when you are configuring but if you want the Exchange support, you will need to enter additional information like server address.

Feature set on the Motorola Milestone XT720 includes quad band world roaming, speed dial, speakerphone, smart dialing, conference calling, voice commands, and multimedia and text messaging. There is Bluetooth 2.1 along with support for stereo Bluetooth but Android 2.1 doesn’t offer voice dialing over Bluetooth. There is also a Phone Portal app that lets you manage the content on the handset through USB or Wi-Fi from a computer.

The Motorola Milestone XT720 works on 1700/2100MHz WCDMA bands, so if you will get 3G if you buy the handset unlocked and put in T-Mobile SIM card. There is another model from Cincinnati Bell version which is also 3G capable. You also get Wi-Fi and the gadget has Android’s WebKit HTML Web browser; the performance is really good and you can open multiple windows. There is support for Flash Lite too.

Motorola Milestone XT720 has pretty good multimedia features. Supported formats are MP3, WAV, AAC, and MPEG-4. The music player has a really attractive Cover Flow-like interface. The music player offers support for shuffle/repeat modes and on-the-fly playlist creation. If you are bored with the music stored on the internal memory, you can groove to the FM radio tunes. There is also a separate Audio Effects app which optimizes the sound for phone speaker and headphones.

Motorola Milestone XT720 comes with an eight megapixel camera it has a Xenon flash. There are plenty of advanced editing options like image stabilization, panorama mode and face detection. You can also shoot HD videos through it. The photo quality was decent as long as I kept the Xenon flash on. With it switched off, the images were grainy and dull. The colors were brighter courtesy of the flash. The picture quality was still murky and HD videos did have that grainy look. Also note that the camera is not fast. I saw plenty of shutter lag and there was some delay when the camera was turned on too.

Motorola Milestone XT720 is powered by a 720MHz TI OMAP processor which is a bit slow. These days, the fastest smartphones have one GHz processor. I did see some delay with the app launches.